Q & A

We recently sat down with Laina Greene to find out more about her passions, her calling and generally dive in deeper to get to know her.

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What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your work over the last few years?

COVID impacted us greatly as we used to do a lot of face-to-face work. Angels of Impact funds and supports businesses owned by women of color that are entrenched in the community. We offer what's called “relationship-based lending,” to borrow the words from ICC. One of the things we found during COVID was that a lot of funding was pulled away for the pandemic relief and even more recently around the Ukraine crisis. Funding for our work became a challenge, and we had to start looking for new sources of funding.

The other challenge we face is that a lot of the work we do is very highly customized and very high-touch. We work directly with women entrepreneurs alongside them wherever they’re located, but during the pandemic, we couldn't travel so we had to do a lot of things online. We had to find ways to accommodate and build relationships and trust in different ways.

What we found most disturbing was how the pandemic impacted the entrepreneurs that we were working with. In some cases, entrepreneurs faced a cut of up to 75% of their revenue, and many of them had reached a point of existential crisis. But failure is not an option for them, because they are important for their communities, and if they fail, their community fails. One of the things we ended up doing was rallying new funders who were willing to give COVID relief funds to them, which aligned with our approach of integrated/blended finance. That was actually the toughest, watching amazing entrepreneurs having a crisis over whether to continue or not and we were grateful to have supported so many to survive the pandemic.

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Developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternatives want to balance profit and purpose and put a premium on sharing power and resources.

Why is getting investments in this alternative model crucial for those who seek it?

When you look at alternative models of doing business, most of the time you're looking at not just a profit-maximizing company, but a company that's looking to profit-maximize to  do more good. And you have two disconnects: You have a business that is actually doing the hard work of making both a profit and an impact, but they have an investor who usually looks more for the financial returns. What we need is an alternative form of finance that matches the alternative model of business. It's the finance and impact business models together that add value and can get BIPOC communities out of poverty and close the racial wealth gap, but we need to see it at a systemic level.

Most impact investors are still looking for market returns or concessionary returns (slightly less than market returns), which is why they don't invest in community level impact businesses run by BIPOC, for example. If we can change the way people see value in these communities–these communities with small urban farms that are helping reduce the carbon footprint or improving biodiversity in indigenous communities. It is time to see returns in new ways too–so we can put a monetary value to the intangibles. Then investors can see both the financial returns and the “doing good” aspect, without expecting both at market return rates. I think the key is having investors who understand that they should not extract profitability from the entrepreneur and the community, if we are to close the racial wealth gap in marginalised communities.

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How do we shift the narrative about the role of capital in BIPOC communities and reframe the perceptions of the risk involved?

First, you have to deal with the elephant in the room. The reason BIPOC communities are seen as risky is not because they cannot run successful businesses, it's because the investors do not see them as capable. The investors often see them only as beneficiaries for handouts and micro-finance. Their own unconscious biases often see them as more risky as they see them as less competent, not innovative, not entrepreneurial, not as intelligent, etc. A mindset shift needs to take place. Once BIPOC people are seen as agents of change, as innovators, as inventors, as leaders and entrepreneurs, then the way they look at risk immediately changes.

Another way to change the narrative is to actually showcase success stories of funds such as ours, where we have100% repayment from the entrepreneurs with Angels of Impact, and we’re not the only organization with those outcomes. These are not risky businesses, actually the opposite, and we need to spread the data that proves this.

Last but not least, to close the racial wealth gap, we need for investors to enable less extractive terms so that the prosperity of that business can be shared for intergenerational wealth building and to help build wealth within the community as well.

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What are the top three pieces of  advice you would give to BIPOC entrepreneurs, who are dedicated to both purpose and profit, as they are starting or scaling their business?

I can only share based on my own lived experience. In my experience, I would say, don't try doing it alone. Reach out to networks like ICC, for example, and learn from others. Seek to collaborate with others. I have found that some of the most successful fundraising models have been when two or three organizations band together and raise funding together.

Second: Take time to recuperate when you feel burnt out. It’s okay to fail and pause. As BIPOC, we fear failure. We feel it is not an option because the work we do is so important and lives depend on it. But we have to be gentle on ourselves and recognize that we're battling many barriers, and we cannot solve all the problems that have gone on for centuries in just one endeavor. So be gentle, take time to recuperate.

The last one, I think, is: Don't be desperate to take anybody's money. Look for money from funders who are aligned with your values and see your vision. It pays in the end to get the right money from the right person, even when you desperately need funds. Getting money from the wrong investor can cause more harm than good.

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What is the call to action for investors who seek to promote social justice through investment solutions?

My call for action is to have more funders who do recognize that money can be used as medicine. Pick up the book Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva and absorb it. It will help you see how you can use your privilege and your money to impact true systems change, and that elevating others benefits all of us. Not to shame or guilt, but I think it is important that people who have privilege recognize why they have that privilege because of the system that marginalized others, and then recognize what they can do to change things by using their resources and privilege so that everyone is uplifted.

Second, look for BIPOC intermediaries and funds in the ICC network and educate yourself  about trauma-informed finance. There is a lot of trauma in BIPOC communities around money,. Even by coming in and saying, “Oh, let me invest in a BIPOC entrepreneur directly,” you could actually be reinforcing that trauma by how you deal with the entrepreneur as an investor and the terms you imposed with that funding. Now, all of a sudden, they're burdened by a debt to you, and you keep asking for reports on your investment, and use metrics to show success that you determine. All the while thinking you are helping a BIPOC entrepreneur yet you’re very unaware that you're perpetuating trauma. Instead, by funding through BIPOC-led funds and intermediaries, they are in a better position to at least be a protector or translator and lead to better outcomes when funding their communities.