Meet RSF’s Integrated Capital Fellows

The RSF Integrated Capital Institute prepares existing and aspiring practitioners to activate the positive potential of capital. Fellows learn alongside a group of experts in the field who are leveraging capital with an integrated and strategic approach to effect an articulated social mission. Fellows learn how to structure financial transactions and implement effective integrated capital strategies. A nine-month program centered around three in-person training intensives, The Institute provides access to one-on-one expert advisors, peer coaching, case studies, webinars, and independent study.

We’ve highlighted some of our inaugural cohort of Integrated Capital Fellows below. Visit the blog again later this month for more highlights! The full list of Fellows and more information about the program is available here.

NWAMAKA AGBO

Restorative Economics practitioner, Nwamaka Agbo brings a solution-oriented approach to project management consulting. With a background in organizing, electoral campaigns, and policy and advocacy on racial, social, and environmental justice issues, Nwamaka supports projects that build resilient, healthy, and self-determined communities rooted in shared prosperity.

Nwamaka is a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center and serves as an Advisory Board Member to Oakland Rising Action. She also serves on the boards of Thousand Currents, Center for Third World Organizing, and the Schumacher Center for New Economics.

As principal & founder of Nwamaka Agbo Consulting, a firm centered on the principles and practices of Restorative Economics, Nwamaka provides project management, strategic guidance, and training and facilitation services to community-owned and governed projects as a power building strategy for self-determination.

JEN ASTONE

As executive director of the Swift Foundation, Jen Astone is focused on transformative food system investments, providing grants, investments, and integrated capital to promote cultural and biological diversity. The Swift Foundation supports indigenous and local communities as well as organizations engaging in land and resource rights, traditional knowledge, agroecology, and alternative economic models. Swift is a member of DivestInvest, the AgroEcology Fund, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Jen is expanding a brief entitled “Investing in Food Systems: Gaps in Capital, Analysis and Leadership.” Through a deep dive into The Swift Foundation’s current food system investments, Jen is examining how different funds and investments use integrated capital to provide foundation investors different types of return with an emphasis on transforming food systems toward human and planetary health.

TIFFANY BROWN & KATE POOLE

Through work with Resource Generation, YES!’s Leveraging Privilege for Social Change programming, and Be Present, Tiffany Brown has developed a unique skill set aimed at bridging class, race, and privilege. Her passion is for bringing humanity to the work of personal and collective transformation by unpacking destructive patterns that divide us while developing new models rooted in shared power. In 2016, Tiffany started her work in finance at Fresh Pond Capital.

Kate Poole began her work in the new economy space at the Schumacher Center for New Economics. She has addressed matters of class privilege and inheritance as a member-leader of Resource Generation and as a founder of Regenerative Finance.

Kate and Tiffany are working in transformative partnership across class and race to launch a financial advising firm. With an explicit commitment to racial and economic justice, they are partnering with values-aligned individuals to bring greater integrity to their portfolios and shift resources to the solidarity economy movement. Through holistic, embodied approaches, Tiffany and Kate are working in community with inheritors and movement partners to transform financial patterns and introduce practices of transparency, integrity, and alignment.

Y. ELAINE RASMUSSEN

Y. Elaine Rasmussen is the CEO of Social Impact Strategies Group (SISG). Driven by the mission to mainstream impact investing and democratize access to capital by and for women and communities of color, SISG provides social impact advising, measurement, and business development consulting. SISG also provides education briefings for entrepreneurs and investors and produces events designed to drive positive, sustainable social impact in the entrepreneur ecosystem.

The ConnectUP! Integrated Capital Fund pilot project is a social finance pilot to establish a blended capital fund. It includes capital planning, community support, and culturally responsive business development designed to address the challenges facing women and people of color as social entrepreneurs. Using a proactive, capital-planning approach, this project aims to guide enterprises through the “valley of death.” The pilot is currently working to raise $500,000 to establish a proof of concept.