At the Intersection of Money and Meaning

The tagline of the Social Capital Markets conference is "at the intersection of money and meaning." It's a great line that simply and quickly sums up the feeling of the place. As the planners started the third day of the event, an unconference in which the participants are the designers and presenters of the content, co-producer Rosa Lee Harden paused to ask attendees to think about what "meaning" means for them.

SoCap is a nonstop whirlwind of conversations. As the "Markets" part of the name might convey, it largely comprises of wonky conversations about shifting risk and reward equations, market bottlenecks, and other financial conversations necessary to build an actual exchange for good.

Yet the interesting assumption that lies underneath is that people are bought in to the idea of baking social and environmental concerns into the core of the business process. In the midst of all the voices who agree upon that at a gathering like SoCap, it's easy to forget how fundamentally dissimilar this mindset is to the most of the rest of the "real" capital markets.

To some extent, what we're all interested in here is behavior change. We want people to shift their consumption towards more sustainable habits. We want companies to change their processes to respect a more holistic concern for people and the planet. We want investors to value enterprises that do these things and pave the way for a sustainable future more than those who would exploit for short-term gain.

But the reality is that while there remain opportunities for short-term resource exploitation, there will always be actors willing to trade the good of the world for their own gain. How do we overwhelm those actors with an ecosystem whose values are so counter to those sort of approaches that the financial incentives just no longer remain?

This may be a pipe dream, but if it's not, it's because people have the capacity to shift their values and recognize the gaps between values and action. The question becomes, how do we tell the story of values without preaching and without condemning those who don't know or don't agree? How do we respect differences of opinion while not compromising on the lines we must drawn in the sand, for the sake of our future?

At the end of the day, I think it's about shifting the cultural conversation, giving people opportunities to learn and to reach their own conclusions, and then giving them a hand in when they want to join the movement.

(Photo: emdot)