CAN 21ST CENTURY CAPITALISM HELP REVERSE SCHOOL FAILURE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND INCOME INEQUALITY?

RESOURCES FROM ZOOM FORUM CHAT

OUR MODERATOR AND PANELISTS

MODERATOR LEIGH HAFREY HR73

Leigh Hafrey is Senior Lecturer in Behavioral and Policy Sciences at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Since 1995, he has offered courses in communication, ethics, and leadership in the MBA and other graduate programs in the U.S. and abroad. He has also taught at Harvard Business School; served as co-Master of Mather House, one of the undergraduate residences in Harvard College; and for 25 years has moderated seminars in programs of the Aspen Institute, an international educational and policy studies organization focused on values-driven leadership. He serves on the boards of the Green Rural Opportunities Fund, a spin-off of the Butajira, Ethiopia-based GreenPath Food, and ClassACT HR73, an alumni initiative of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1973.

A former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review, Hafrey has published translations from French and German and columns, feature articles, essays, reviews, and interviews in The New York Times and other periodicals, as well as blog posts and business case studies for MIT Sloan. He is the author of two books on values and leadership, The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business (2005) and War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading (2016). Hafrey holds an A.B. in English Literature from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

ROGER FERGUSON HR73

Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., is the Immediate Past President and CEO of TIAA. Prior to joining TIAA, Mr. Ferguson was head of financial services for Swiss Re and Chairman of Swiss Re America Holding Corporation. Mr. Ferguson is the former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. He began his career as an attorney at the New York City office of Davis Polk & Wardwell and was an Associate and Partner at McKinsey & Company. Mr. Ferguson is a member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He serves on the boards of Alphabet, Inc.; Corning, Inc.; General Mills, Inc.; and International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc. Mr. Ferguson is also active as an advisor and board member with various private fintech companies. He serves on the boards of The Conference Board, the Institute for Advanced Study, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Mr. Ferguson holds a B.A., J.D., and a Ph.D. in economics, all from Harvard University.

CALL TO ACTION

• Get educated on capitalism:
• Get the facts, think through potential solutions, and recognize that capitalism is the way we're going to organize society. 
• It's up to us, as it was up to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and others, to figure out how, in our own ways, we can work to make the system better.

NATASHA LAMB

@ArjunaCapital

@nllamb

Natasha works with clients to integrate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors into their investments, while engaging major corporations to improve their performance through shareholder activism.

Named by Bloomberg Businessweek as one of the “Bloomberg 50” most influential people who defined global business in 2017, Natasha was also featured on the cover of the magazine in June 2017. In 2018, she was named to InStyle magazine’s ‘The Badass 50: women who are changing the world’ list.

Natasha is a regular contributor to CNBC and Bloomberg TV. She has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, and Fast Company, while her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR and CNN.

In 2016, Natasha received the ‘Aiming High Award’ from Legal Momentum for pioneering a shareholder campaign on gender and racial pay equity. Her 2014 landmark negotiation with Exxon Mobil led to the company’s first public report on global warming and carbon asset risk.

Natasha has served as Chairman of the board of the Intentional Endowments Network and on the boards of The Food Project and Change is Simple. She holds an M.B.A in Sustainable Business from Presidio Graduate School, where she taught sustainable investing for 5 years. Natasha received her B.A. cum laude from Mount Holyoke College.

CALL TO ACTION

• We live in an imperfect, morally complex landscape. Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.  

• We need to act, and everyone has a unique role to play. What is your power center? What are the actions... unique to you that will make the world head in the direction you want it to go? 

TRACY PALANDJIAN

@SocialFinanceUS

Tracy Palandjian is CEO and Co-Founder of Social Finance, a national impact finance and advisory nonprofit that builds innovative partnerships and investments to measurably improve lives. Since 2011, the firm has pioneered impact investments including the Social Impact Bond and the Career Impact Bond to mobilize capital at scale and deliver sustainable impact in communities across the United States. Social Finance is driven by the belief that social and economic systems should enable all people to thrive, and the conviction that we can create the most meaningful and measurable change in our communities when governments and markets work together.

Tracy has worked for over a decade to reimagine the role of the capital markets in enabling social progress. Building on the work of Social Finance UK, Tracy co-founded Social Finance in 2011 with Sir Ronald Cohen and David Blood to launch the Social Impact Bond field in the United States. In the early years, Social Finance led the development of the Social Impact Bond ecosystem, contributing to thought leadership, impact measurement, and policy work at the federal, state, and local levels, including the passage of historic federal legislation in 2018. The firm became a fund manager in 2019 to launch its Career Impact Bond strategy, a financing model that improves economic mobility for unemployed and underemployed individuals. Social Finance also develops recoverable grant platforms for donor-advised funds, aiming to unlock the $150 billion in DAF assets toward greater social impact. To date, Social Finance has catalyzed over $225 million to help more than 35,000 individuals realize improved outcomes in education, economic mobility, health, and housing.

Prior to Social Finance, Tracy was a Managing Director for eleven years at The Parthenon Group, where she established and led the Nonprofit Practice and worked with foundations and NGOs to accomplish their missions in the U.S. and globally. Tracy also worked at Wellington Management Company and McKinsey & Company.

Tracy is an author of Workforce Realigned: How New Partnerships Are Advancing Economic Mobility, a book published by Social Finance and the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Philadelphia with case studies on how to reboot economic mobility in America. She is also co-author of “Investing for Impact: Case Studies Across Asset Classes” and serves as Vice Chair of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance and a Trustee of the Global Steering Group on Impact Investing. In addition, Tracy is an Independent Director of Affiliated Managers Group (NYSE: AMG), a Trustee at the Surdna Foundation where she chairs the Investment Committee, and a Director at both The Boston Foundation and Mass General Brigham. Previously, Tracy served as Vice Chair of the Harvard Board of Overseers, Board Chair of Facing History and Ourselves, Co-Chair of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and Trustee of Milton Academy.

Tracy is a frequent speaker and writer on ESG and impact investing, social innovation, and results-oriented policymaking, having been covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, TIME, Institutional Investor, and Forbes. A native of Hong Kong, Tracy is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and holds an M.B.A. with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She was a 2019 recipient of the HBS Alumni Achievement Award, the School’s highest honor.

CALL TO ACTION

• We have no choice but to rethink the economic paradigm [of capitalism], and to [pursue] an economic paradigm that places the wellbeing of our communities...at its center.

• We have to balance the benefits of capitalism, including incentivizing and rewarding individual accomplishments, with making sure that people, especially those who have been systematically marginalized, have the opportunity to thrive.

• Despite its complexity and how hard this work is, it is some of the most rewarding and intellectually interesting. I encourage you to volunteer and get involved...get your children and grandchildren to have a career in the sector. We need the best minds and most courageous souls to lean in and help rebuild our economic system.

CLASSACT HR73'S CALL TO ACTION

• On the personal level, all of us interact with various businesses every day, sometimes as customers, sometimes as investors, sometimes in other roles. The panelists tonight have shown us how businesses can promote important social goals. This gives each of us the opportunity to advance these social goals ourselves by choosing to do business with socially conscious organizations. And if we have the chance to nudge a company in a positive direction – such as by voting the proxies for our investments – we should do that.
• Meanwhile, ClassACT will maintain its institutional focus on the non-profit sector in health care, the environment, education, and social justice and civic engagement. At the same time, it seems clear from this evening’s panel that an evolving private sector offers new and effective approaches to our goals. On behalf of all ClassACT, I hope we can make the for-profit world a factor in our initiatives.