How RUNWAY is Reshaping the Culture of Finance
Credit: Megan Totah Design
There’s no skirting around the fact that the U.S. financial system is fundamentally flawed. The financial system has been established using a complex framework of laws, regulations, institutions, and practices to support the economy and serve the people.
But, when the system values profit over people or the planet, who gets left behind?
The way the system has been designed benefits the wealthy and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few while exacerbating wealth disparities and leaving marginalized communities struggling to access basic financial services. For the sector of finance that manages the flow of capital to individuals and businesses–the culture continues to be defined by a long-standing history (and ongoing conduct) of discriminatory and extractive practices, unjust policies, and a lack of accountability. For marginalized communities, the culture of finance can be synonymous with a culture of harm.
In order to address deep-rooted income and wealth disparities and heal, repair, and restore resiliency within Black and other marginalized communities, we must transform the culture of finance.
We do this by prioritizing people and the planet over profits and leading with our core values:
Reimagination
By reimagining financial policies and practices and building emergent infrastructure that dismantles systemic barriers and supports Black entrepreneurship and wealth creation, we can heal, repair, and increase resilience within the Black community.
Resilience
We commit to upholding a culture of self-care, healing, and restoration within Black-led organizations to encourage and empower financial sustainability that aligns with our communal capacity to recover from natural and man-made disasters and build resilience.
Restoration
We believe it is necessary to instill collaboration, collectivism, and connection into our practices to ensure a more equitable economic vision takes root and closes the racial wealth gap for good.
Repair
We believe that justice-centered financial innovation and self determination are key levers to economic resilience for healthy and whole Black communities. By co-creating new models of fundraising and social financing that is entrepreneur-centric and non-extractive, we build a bridge between investors and the Black community that repair the conditions that uphold the racial wealth gap.
The systemic barriers and injustices that have been entrenched in our economic structures have no place in the economy we have been reimagining for years and co-creating with values-aligned partners and funders.
By acknowledging how the financial system has upheld a culture of harm, extraction, and exclusion, we can unpack the flagrant offenses, begin healing our individual and collective financial trauma, and grow in right relationship with wealth holders and investors who are committed to the same.
It is time for real systems change. As culture-makers of finance, we advance strategies that center the economic well-being of those that have been historically blocked from building wealth.
Here are some of those strategies in practice:
We embrace a restorative approach to promote accountability within financial institutions and systems so that all individuals have access to build wealth, live with dignity, and prosper. We created a Funder Manifesto to help inform our community of investors, and prospective investors, on the ways in which we embrace the financial relationships that fuel our work. It is an invitation to capitalize our work in ways that are sustainable and equitable and that center trust-based relationships over transactional ones.
We apply the principles and practices of Just Transition to build economic and political power that shifts away from an extractive economy towards a regenerative one. We prioritize funding Black entrepreneurs who share our values and are interested in growing their businesses in ways that build community wealth and benefit people and the planet over profits alone.
We listen deeply and learn from the communities most impacted by structural inequities so that we can build emergent financial policies and practices rooted in equity and Black liberation. We recently launched ROOTED, our 10-year initiative to invest in Southern Black entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation by moving integrated capital in restorative ways, through and with local partnerships, in an effort to dismantle systemic barriers and help Black entrepreneurs and creatives build intergenerational wealth.
