Capital for Good

We find ourselves at a moment of unprecedented challenge – and opportunity. While the COVID-19 health, economic, and racial crises have laid bare and exacerbated any number of structural inequalities, and global climate change remains an existential – and very urgent – threat, they also compel us to reimagine how leaders across the private, nonprofit, and public sectors can champion social and environmental change in ways that truly advance shared prosperity and a sustainable future. Presented by the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change at Columbia Business School, Capital for Good provides a window into this reimagined future: a chance to hear from corporate and civic leaders about their visions, plans, commitments, and on-the ground efforts to build a more just, inclusive, and sustainable society. Through in depth and candid conversations, we will explore and unpack solutions to some of our most urgent challenges. Can business be a force for good? What is stakeholder capitalism? What is the role of capital markets and philanthropy along the pathways to inclusive growth? How do we encourage and scale grassroots and broad-based innovation? How can public private partnerships help bring all of our resources and ingenuity to bear? About the Tamer Institute for Social Enterprise and Climate Change The institute educates leaders to use business knowledge, entrepreneurial skills, and management tools to address social and environmental challenges. About the Host Georgia Levenson Keohane is a seasoned executive in the private and nonprofit sectors at the intersection of capital markets, responsible investing and business, and philanthropy and public policy; an award winning author; and an adjunct professor of social enterprise at Columbia Business School.

Julie Samuels, Tech:NYC and New York’s Innovation Economy 07/16/2026

Julie Samuels, Tech:NYC and New York’s Innovation Economy In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Julie Samuels, the founder, president, and CEO of Tech:NYC, a network of technology leaders dedicated to fostering a dynamic, diverse, and creative New York. Launched in 2016, Tech:NYC operates at the intersection of business, government, academia, and philanthropy, convening leaders to strengthen New York's innovation economy through policy, partnerships, and programs. We begin with some of Samuels’s formative experiences at the intersection of technology and policy: a college internship at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, work as an IP lawyer and at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and her leadership of Engine, the national nonprofit focused on technology entrepreneurship and advocacy. We also discuss the context and conditions that would inform the launch of Tech:NYC: the groundwork laid by the Bloomberg Administration to foster the growth of the city’s tech sector, a critical mass of tech firms in the city, and industry leaders like Fred Wilson, Kevin Ryan and Tim Armstrong who recognized that better and coordinated leadership could help shape New York’s continued growth as the country (and world’s) number two tech hub behind Silicon Valley. Samuels is passionate about the technology-city nexus. “Tech culture and tech zeitgeist really lend themselves to an urbanist way of seeing the world,” she says. “People in tech have a systems framework, and big urban centers like New York are all about systems — think about things like public transit. This makes for natural connection between tech and urban centers.” She notes that New York has been particularly successful in tech because of the diversity of its other industries: companies can apply and test technologies developed on the West Coast to other markets, from financial services and health care to real estate, hospitality, media, fashion, or wherever New York is the world’s “center of gravity.” According to Samuels, these dynamics underpin the sector’s extraordinary growth: today technology is the city’s fastest growing industry with over $30 billion in annual venture capital flowing to 25,000 startups and accounting for 300,000 jobs (64 percent growth over the last decade, 41 percent of net job growth since 2019) and nine percent of the Gross City Product. Samuels underscores the cultural reasons this growth is durable: “Tech is a creative industry,” she explains. “It benefits from the creative energy of a big city… density, networks of different kinds of people, cultural institutions, night life. When I lived in San Francisco, I would meet tech people who lived in SF. Here, we have New Yorkers who work in tech.” Tech:NYC’s work has evolved over the last ten years, while remaining true to its mission “to ensure New York City is the best place to start and grow a tech company.” For Samuels, this mission is two-fold: create the conditions for the tech industry to thrive and integrate technology into the life of the city in ways that uplift everyone. “As tech radically changes how all of us live and work,” Samuels says, “Tech:NYC exists to ensure transition is as smooth as possible.” As a research and policy advocacy organization, Tech:NYC focused its early years primarily on technology policy and the role of the tech sector in the city and state’s larger economy. Today, Samuels notes, while Tech:NYC still works closely on tech policy — things like data privacy, broadband, or public private partnerships like Empire AI, which will provide state-of-the-art power for New York's top University researchers to develop safe, equitable, and responsible AI — it is also focused more broadly on basic “livability” issues like housing, education, and public safety that allow people to live, work and raise families in New York. Tech:NYC's work also extends to programs like Decoded Futures, a capacity-building AI initiative that equips leaders from the social sector with the tools and skills to use AI to scale their impact, and the Grid Fellowship, which connects technology leaders with New York's public sector. And since its earliest days, Tech:NYC has undertaken many initiatives in K-12 and higher education and workforce development to invest in the participation of all New Yorkers in the tech economy. We discuss the challenges of the current moment, including the advent of AI and its attending economic and political complexities. Ultimately, Samuels says, “Progress is real; we’re strivers, builders, creators. Let’s lean into that, and make sure growth happens with intention and with the right guardrails. New York can lead on this.” Mentioned in this episode: , (Tech:NYC and Accenture, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/42039775

Antony Bugg-Levine: Investing in America 07/02/2026

Antony Bugg-Levine: Investing in America In this Episode of Capital for Good we speak with Antony Bugg-Levine, a global leader in economic development, policy, and responsible business and investment. Twenty years ago, Bugg-Levine convened the meeting that coined the phrase “impact investing;” he would go on to co-found the Global Impact Investing Network, write a definitive book on the subject, lead the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and shape the ways capital flows to important economic, social and environmental challenges — giving more people access to fair finance, and opportunity. His new book, Investing in America, is as much a window into the inspiring work of “practical problem solvers” as it is a personal chronicle: in Bugg-Levine’s words “one grateful immigrant’s 250th birthday gift to the country that has given my family and me so much.” In this wide ranging conversation, we discuss the formative experiences that animate Bugg-Levine’s life-long commitment to expanding opportunity: his childhood in South Africa during apartheid and his later work in the country when the new Constitution afforded political rights that were challenging to achieve in the face of entrenched economic inequality; his experience in the US as an immigrant for whom the “American Dream” was both inspiration and reality — often because of access to “fair finance” like college loans and a 30-year mortgage; the recognition that these kinds of opportunities are increasingly elusive for many Americans. Bugg-Levine, who is also an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, explains how “Investing in America” has a long and foundational history, citing the example of Ben Franklin, who rewrote his will in 1789 to create revolving loan funds for workers in Boston and Philadelphia to start their own businesses. The youngest son in a family of seventeen siblings, Franklin worked for his brother in a print shop, and only through a loan arranged by a friend was able to start his own small business that would change the trajectory of his life and make possible his contributions to community and country. Franklin’s “core insight,” Bugg-Levine notes, is that “hard work, grit, and determination are necessary, but not sufficient;” they often need to be linked to access to fair finance to translate opportunity into progress. Investing in America shows Franklin’s legacy is alive and relevant, covering 70 case studies across 42 states and a broad range of topics that most Americans agree are national priorities: among them worker well-being and good jobs; housing and homeownership; clean, affordable, and resilient energy; education; health care; technology; natural resource protection; and direct access to capital. We discuss several. While clear eyed about many of the challenges Americans face, Bugg-Levine is also optimistic that solutions to these challenges often enjoy bipartisan support. He also believes that all of us have a role to play and cites tangible ways — from banking locally to voting for candidates who advance these solutions — everyone can participate. “Investing in America is not a spectator sport,” Bugg-Levine says. “We as a people can be part of the project of making the ideas of the American Dream a reality for everyone.” Mentioned in this episode: , (Antony Bugg-Levine, 2026) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/41579510

New York Media Matters – and Leaders: Christy Tanner ’99 and Carroll Bogert 06/18/2026

New York Media Matters – and Leaders: Christy Tanner ’99 and Carroll Bogert In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with two extraordinary media leaders — Christy Tanner ’99, the president and CEO of New York Public Radio, an iconic and 100-year-old center for local and global media, and Carroll Bogert, the CEO of The City Reporter, the independent newsroom founded in 2019 to cover breaking news, investigative, and service journalism in New York City. In this wide-ranging conversation, we hear from these industry veterans about their early callings as reporters, their respective careers as pioneers — one using journalism to hold power to account, one forging new business models in the face of technological transformation — and their thoughts about the challenges, and opportunities, of the current moment in New York and around the world. We start with Tanner and Bogert’s gravitational pulls to journalism and the formative experiences as reporters that would shape their careers in media. Tanner explains how as a young girl, inspired by the likes of Nancy Drew and Nellie Bly, the ability to “ask questions, investigate things, find out what’s going on,” and the creative process of writing “captured my imagination.” Her first jobs at the AP and in local newsrooms in South Carolina and Tennessee taught her how investigative reporting could have tangible impact, prompting changes in government policies. For Bogert, a member of the generation of idealists who grew up on “Woodward and Bernstein and All the President’s Men,” journalism was “something noble… and world changing:” a way to “uncover abuse at the top and change history.” As a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, she would chronicle the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the fall of the Soviet Union. As the industry evolved, so too did their respective paths. Bogert would go on to leadership roles at Human Rights Watch and as the founding president of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering criminal justice in the United States. “The though line,” she says, is that “challenging the abuse of power is the essential role of journalism. Power requires constant vigilance because it will trend towards abuse if it’s not watched.” Tanner, whose experiences included hosting a kind of proto-podcast in the mid-1990s, saw early on that “the internet was going to change media forever.” Back in New York, she had a “front row seat to the invention of streaming as we know it” — newspapers, magazines, television, audio — and would become a leader in the digital transformation of legacy media companies like The Washington Post, Reed Elsevier, TV Guide, and CBS. While both new in their current seats, Tanner and Bogert bring their expertise as seasoned industry leaders — and New Yorkers – to the roles. Tanner notes that while NYPR has grown into a multiplatform organization with radio (WNYC, WQXR), digital news, and podcasts with significant national and global reach, its local resonance with New Yorkers is remarkably strong. Bogert explains that at “this historical moment,” when investigative newsrooms are disappearing, “local media is where it’s at.” She believes that the independence of nonprofit media organizations gives them “a particularly special role” to hold political leaders accountable and to rebuild trust in media. While acknowledging any number of challenges — in the industry, in a fraught political environment — Tanner and Bogert are optimistic: about the opportunities for organizations like theirs to collaborate, to “share best practices,” to develop more sustainable business models, and to cultivate greater understanding of the need of philanthropy to support media as a critical pillar of our civic infrastructure. Mentioned in this episode: /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/41629370

Robert K. Steel: Leadership Across the Private, Public, and Nonprofit Sectors 06/04/2026

Robert K. Steel: Leadership Across the Private, Public, and Nonprofit Sectors In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Bob Steel, partner and vice chairman of Perella Weinberg Partners, whose career has spanned the pinnacles of business, government and nonprofit leadership. Following nearly three decades at Goldman Sachs, Steel held senior roles at the US Treasury, as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance under President George W. Bush, and in New York City government as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development under Mike Bloomberg; was CEO of Wachovia Corporation and Perella Weinberg; and along the way has served on numerous boards, corporate and civic, including at major universities like Duke, important ideas and policy organizations like the Aspen Institute, and several of New York City’s anchor institutions. We begin with some of the formative individuals and institutions that would shape Steel’s trajectory: his parents, who set an example of service to their North Carolina community; the attention of Dr. Joel Fleishman, a Duke Professor who challenged Steel to become a more engaged student; and the opportunity to join Goldman Sachs in 1976 when John Whitehead and John Weinberg took over the leadership of the firm. “I got on the bus at the right time,” Steel says. Steel describes what it was like to work at Goldman Sachs in a period of extraordinary growth and globalization. Over close to three decades, he built several businesses across the US and Europe — “multiple careers in one institution” — and ultimately served as the firm’s vice chairman and member of its management committee. “The moral of the story,” he observes, “is that well-led firms that are growing create opportunities that are pretty special.” In 2006, at the urging of fellow Goldman Sachs partner — and recently confirmed US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson — Steel went to Treasury to serve as Under Secretary for Domestic Finance. Within a year, the country was in the throes of the financial crisis, and with the support of Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, Steel and his colleagues labored to prevent the worst impacts of the crisis on the American people, and to begin to steer the economy to more stable ground. After Treasury, Steel returned to the private sector as CEO of Wachovia, where he led the bank’s sale to Wells Fargo. Soon after Mike Bloomberg recruited him to serve as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, where he would oversee the administration’s five borough economic development strategy and job creation efforts across more than a dozen city agencies: tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in annual operating budgets. We discuss a number of the major initiatives that Steel and the Bloomberg team undertook, among them the creation of the Cornell Technion campus, today a center of applied science in the city and region. We also discuss Mayor Bloomberg’s vision for long-term investments, and the latitude given to an exceptional and collegial cohort of talented commissioners. “It might be my best job ever, I learned so much,” Steel says. Through these experiences, Steel has come to understand the distinct but complementary roles of the private, public, and nonprofit sectors, and their respective and mutually supportive “vectors of leverage.” “You can’t have successful business without government,” he believes, “and you can’t have good government without successful businesses. And then you add NGOs that provide exceptional seasoning and consciousness that is beneficial.” Although no longer at city hall, Steel remains deeply involved in the life of the city, with board roles at Lincoln Center, Rockefeller University, the Hospital for Special Surgery, the Economic Club of New York, the Partnership for New York City, The Morgan Library, and the New York Climate Exchange. We touch on New York’s recovery from the pandemic; why some of today’s challenges, including affordability, are a function of the city’s success (i.e., not enough housing for all the people who want to be in New York); the competition from smaller cities across the country as attractive places to live and work; and the opportunity and imperative to make long-term investments in the city’s future: schools, infrastructure, arts, parks, among them. We conclude where the conversation began: “I’m so appreciative of the organizations and people that helped me grow,” Steel says. “If you did a balance of trade, I've gained so much more than I gave that I feel incredibly fortunate.” Mentioned in this episode: /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/41440945

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Heart of a Stranger 05/21/2026

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl: The Heart of a Stranger In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in New York City and the first woman to lead that congregation in its 185-year history. Born in Korea to a Jewish American father and a Korean Buddhist mother, Buchdahl is the first Asian American to be ordained as a cantor or rabbi in North America. She is also well known for her innovations in leading worship, reaching millions across 100 countries via livestream and cable broadcast. Her New York Times best-selling memoir, Heart of a Stranger, roots her unlikely story and experience as an outsider and boundary crosser in both ancient Jewish traditions and in the universal longing for belonging. Heart of a Stranger, Buchdahl explains, is both a particular and shared narrative. She tells us that, as a child, she often felt she was an outsider: Korean in America, American when she returned to Korea, and an unusual mixed-race family in the Jewish community. She connects this experience to her family’s — starting with her mother who was born in Japan, where her family had been displaced, before returning to Korea and eventually immigrating to the United States — and to ancient Jewish narratives, from the biblical story of Abraham, a stranger in a foreign land, to millennia as diaspora outsiders around the world. Buchdahl also speaks of crossing boundaries to find home. “Home is where your people are,” her mother told her, and then demonstrated how welcoming others (as an ESL teacher in Tacoma, Washington and a founder of an organization to assist new immigrants to the US — in Buchdahl’s words, a “serial welcomer”) could be transformative for everyone, creating community in the place of strangeness. This too, Buchdahl reminds us — the act of welcoming, with compassion and empathy — has roots in Abrahamic and other spiritual traditions and can be a powerful antidote to the isolation and polarization dividing us today. Agency and intentionality are central themes of the book, and of our conversation. We discuss what this means in the Jewish context — Buchdahl’s decision and acts to define her own identity and path –— and its more universal applications: the spiritual imperative we all have to be boundary crossers. For Buchdahl, much of her early calling and connection to faith came through music, what she calls “my natural spiritual language.” We explore how music has shaped her identity, her roles as cantor and rabbi, and the way she leads the congregation at Central Synagogue. Music is about beauty, she notes, but even more so about the “energy and electricity that comes when we’re making it together.” Buchdahl believes that much of her responsibility is to feel and modulate that energy. We end with a broader discussion of leadership and what it means to have the “appropriate” amount of humility (in Hebrew, “anavah”) to lead. Sometimes, Buchdahl says, even if it is uncomfortable, “you have to step in to fill that space,” and all the more so in moments of destabilization. “You have to speak to people’s fear, to then move forward and beyond.” While there is no shortage of challenges — Buchdahl cites anti-Semitism, climate and technological change, isolation and polarization, to name a few — she also believes “there are ways to mine each crisis for the opportunity it provides us.” We conclude with a return to agency — and exhortation. “Every day,” Buchdahl says, “we can take one step towards building the world we want to live in.” Mentioned in this episode: , (Angela Buchdahl, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/41282440

Marla Blow, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation: Transformation and Renewal 05/14/2026

Marla Blow, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation: Transformation and Renewal In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Marla Blow, the president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, the leading philanthropy focused on social entrepreneurship and innovation around the world. Over the course of this conversation, we learn how Blow’s career in finance and financial inclusion, across the private and public sectors, would prepare her to lead a dynamic institution and community of innovators in this era of extraordinary change — and resilience. We begin with important elements of Blow’s origin story, including her childhood outside of Atlanta, a city (then) on the precipice of rapid growth, where she was drawn to the idea of helping people translate opportunity into long-term financial security. “I thought I could help people make better decisions,” she said. That instinct would carry her to Wharton, Wall Street, an MBA at Stanford, and to Capital One, where she learned the discipline of applied behavioral economics and consumer lending. In the Obama Administration, Blow joined the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she began to see more clearly the full landscape of American consumers — including those who were not well served by the traditional financial system or many of its products. That realization led her to found FS Card Inc to provide fairly priced credit to underserved consumers, an experience Blow describes as a “crash course” in entrepreneurship and the capital markets. Following the successful sale of FS Card, Blow helped lead Mastercard’s Center for Inclusive Growth, where she was able to pursue financial inclusion at scale. Blow speaks candidly about the extraordinary moment in which she assumed the CEO role at Skoll in 2025. The dismantling of USAID and broader cutbacks of support to and from multilateral finance institutions sent seismic shocks through the social entrepreneurship ecosystem that Skoll has supported since 1999. "I don't think any of us could have predicted that things would shift in this magnitude, or that they would shift this quickly," she says. And yet, Blow also describes with great admiration the resilience of individuals and organizations “that have been able to figure out how to pivot," efforts the foundation supported with a $25 million “pivot fund.” Blow draws on the analogy of a forest of seemingly freestanding trees that are deeply interconnected beneath the surface. "It's the roots that enable them to transmit nutrients, to transmit information, to rebuild and regrow after absorbing and experiencing a shock," she says. We also discuss a signature dimension of Skoll’s work: the role of catalytic capital in driving impact. Today, approximately 80 percent of Skoll’s endowment, managed in partnership with the Capricorn Investment Group, is aligned with the foundation’s impact objectives in climate change mitigation and resilience, economic opportunity, health care, and responsible stewardship. Blow explains that these kinds of investments are not concessionary — their “financial returns continue to meet or exceed the performance of comparable asset classes” — and are exemplified by social enterprises like Apis & Heritage Capital Partners, a 2025 Skoll Award recipient that transitions small businesses to employee ownership – and has enabled main street workers to increase their net worth by a factor of ten. We close with Blow’s sources of optimism. They begin, she explains, with community — the cross-ideological partnership emerging across philanthropy, the private sector’s increased engagement, the deep networks built over more than two decades of convening social entrepreneurs at the Skoll World Forum. “We are going through something, it’s going to take a toll,” she says. “And there is a light on the other side of it. We can continue working toward that light.” Mentioned in this episode: , The Skoll Foundation 2026 Annual Letter , (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Blow & Gips, 2024) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/41282405

Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO, The New York Public Library: Master Class in Transformative Leadership 04/23/2026

Anthony W. Marx, President and CEO, The New York Public Library: Master Class in Transformative Leadership In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with Tony Marx, the president and CEO of the New York Public Library, the nation’s largest library system and the world’s preeminent public research library. Marx’s reimagination of this storied institution builds on his transformative leadership in higher education when he served as president of Amherst College. A distinguished scholar and political scientist, Marx’s education — in the power of education — was forged by his experience in South Africa in the 1980s. We begin this wide ranging conversation with Marx’s beginnings: his childhood in New York City’s Inwood neighborhood, high school at Bronx Science, the intellectual care and attention he received from professors at Wesleyan and Yale, and his early passion for political science, inspired by his involvement in the anti-apartheid movements on campus and the “excitement of being involved in something bigger than myself, and thinking about social justice at scale.” Marx would soon move to South Africa, where he helped create Khanya College, a free, residential liberal arts college for Black South Africans to prepare them for entry and success in the country’s top universities, where they had long been excluded. Marx notes that his years in South Africa were “life changing,” allowing him to live and work with “people who were living and dying for the rights of democracy that we take for granted,” and teaching him how one year of high-quality education at Khanya could “undo” twelve years of a stunting K-12 system. “The power of the human mind, the power of education to feed the human mind, should never be underestimated,” Marx says. These lessons would define his career and life’s work. Back in New York, Marx’s scholarship on Africa and questions of nationalism earned him tenure at Columbia, where he and his family spent thirteen fruitful years. Without extensive administrative experience or ties to Amherst, Marx was surprised to find himself a serious candidate in the presidential search of the country’s leading liberal arts college, but soon discovered that Amherst’s board was ready to lean into change from its position of strength. “When you’re at the top of the game is when you should take risk,” Marx believes. “It’s a wild way of thinking, but it’s the right way of thinking, but nobody thinks that way.” With the board’s support, Marx undertook a number of groundbreaking initiatives that would make Amherst an even stronger institution; he is best known for his efforts to increase significantly the economic diversity of the student body, improving the school’s racial diversity, and academic standing, in the process. In 2010, the New York Public Library came calling. Marx saw in the library’s unusual combination of assets — a branch system that served millions of people in person each year (the most trusted and visited civic institution in the city) and the world’s most used public research library — a 130-year-old educational institution ripe for “innovation at scale.” Over fifteen years, Marx and his colleagues have invested significantly in the branch libraries, transmuting them into community centers, which today are, after the schools and CUNY, the city’s largest provider of educational services, all free, from early literacy and career training to English language and technology instruction. In Inwood, Marx’s childhood branch, the NYPL has partnered with various public development agencies and philanthropies to build 175 units of affordable housing atop a new library and community center, a model they are pursuing at other sites across the city. In wifi “deserts,” the team has worked with internet service providers to beam broadband from local libraries into the neighborhoods. Technology has also been crucial to expanding global access to the research libraries, starting with vast and copyright-respecting digitization efforts. “The notion is that every book ever written should be available to anyone on the planet for free through their library — that’s the aspiration and we’re building it,” Marx proclaims. He has not shied away from the promise of artificial intelligence to support this work, if AI can be harnessed in ways consistent with the institution’s values including “privacy, veracity, and respect.” “Even more than books, trust is our greatest asset” Marx says. He therefore holds that institutions like the New York Public Library have a role to play in shaping the responsible evolution of these new technologies, and to ensure equitable access to information and knowledge. “It all goes back to the same lesson I learned in South Africa… that the world learned in the Enlightenment,” he concludes. “We have to respect everyone. We have to be compassionate towards everyone. We have to understand that everyone has the capacity to learn, to create, to inspire, to inspire others, to have empathy, so that we can live in the world we want to live in.” Mentioned in this Podcast Lessons of Struggle: South African Internal Opposition, 1960-1990, (Oxford University Press, 1992) Making Race and Nation: a Comparison of South Africa, the United States and Brazil, (Cambridge University Press, 1997) , (Michael Kimmelman for the New York Times, 2024) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/40966585

John Witt and The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America 04/09/2026

John Witt and The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with John Fabian Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a professor of history at Yale, and one of the country’s most distinguished legal historians. The author of numerous award-winning books, including American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 and Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, Witt joins us to discuss his latest, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025). We begin with the genesis — of the Garland Fund and Witt’s interest in writing about it. He explains that most histories of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case include mention of a "funny little foundation" that gave early support to the NAACP, launching the legal campaign that would culminate in the desegregation landmark. Witt discovered, however, that Brown was "just the tip of the iceberg.” The Garland Fund — named for the young idealist Charles Garland, who at twenty-one refused a million-dollar inheritance — in fact had its fingerprints on a sweeping range of progressive movements in the United States that would shape American democracy. And Witt notes, the conditions of 1920s America that shaped the fund’s creation — deep economic inequality, declining labor unions, surging ethno-nationalism, immigration backlash, threats to free speech — look "astonishingly like 2020s America." The fund would come to be known officially as the American Fund for Public Service. We discuss the fund's three principal focus areas — labor, civil liberties, and civil rights — and the extraordinary cast assembled by inaugural director Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, to govern it, including labor leader (and New Deal “industrial democracy” architect) Sidney Hillman; James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP; and editors from The Nation and The New Republic. We explore some of the initial tensions between the fund’s labor and racial justice priorities, and the eventual fusion of the two via efforts like A. Philip Randolph’s creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the all-Black union within the Pullman Car Company. Witt suggests that this marriage of civil rights and labor organizing — “working class solidarity across racial lines” — was a central contribution of the fund and its grantees. We also touch on the fund's intentionally unconventional approach to philanthropy. Conceived as a kind of "anti-Rockefeller Foundation," the Garland Fund had virtually no staff and was deeply conscious of the “paradox” of “using a Wall Street fortune to attack capitalism and inequality.” Many of the fund's progressive investments failed, and others would take years to come to fruition, paying dividends in the newly “plastic” political landscape of the Great Depression. We conclude with lessons for today from the Garland Fund's experience. Witt asks, if the industrial union was the unit “well suited to manage mass production capitalism” and therefore “responsible for a good deal of equalization of the American economy” for much of the 20th century — what is the 21st century equivalent. "What's going to connect people together and to their economic futures such that some kind of decent political coalition of people who feel the security sufficient to be good citizens can come out of it?" This episode of Capital for Good was recorded at a book talk hosted by the Open Society Foundations in New York. Mentioned in this Episode: , (Simon & Schuster, 2025) , (Simon & Schuster, 2012) , (New York Times, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/40406785

Deven Parekh, Insight Partners: Software, Startups, and Scale-ups in the Age of AI 03/26/2026

Deven Parekh, Insight Partners: Software, Startups, and Scale-ups in the Age of AI In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Deven Parekh, renowned technology investor, civic leader, and managing director of Insight Partners, the global software investment firm. Over the course of the wide-ranging conversation, we learn about Insight’s deep expertise and differentiation in software investing, Parekh’s own evolution as a business leader, and how he thinks about the current moment — as an investor, engaged nonprofit board member, and New Yorker. We begin with Parekh's early days. He entered college as a budding scientist, but soon “traded his early love of biochemistry for economics,” and graduated from Wharton into a career in finance, first at Blackstone and then the merchant bank Berenson Minella & Company. When Parekh joined Insight Partners in 1999, it was a team of approximately ten; today Insight is a 450-person global firm, with over $90 billion in assets under management, and investing out of its thirteenth fund. Parekh walks us through the distinguishing elements of Insight’s strategy, including a singular focus on software across the full investment continuum from early-stage venture to private equity like buyouts; a nearly 70-person strong and proactive sourcing team; and a dedicated operations group, Insight OnSite, that works in a hands-on way with portfolio companies. Having made over 140 investments over his career — across business cycles and dynamic market conditions — Parekh underscores the value of flexibility in Insight’s approach. For example, "venture buyouts" — acquiring controlling interests in strong but not-yet-public software companies — initially structured in response to liquidity challenges in private markets — have become one of Insight's strongest-performing deal archetypes, with over 70 completed to date. Parekh also explains Insight’s approach to artificial intelligence: as an investment opportunity, particularly in early-stage companies; as a tool to improve Insight's own operations; and as a lever for value creation across the portfolio, where the OnSite team helps incumbent software companies integrate AI into their products and business models. We touch on Parekh's civic commitments, including as a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the US International Development Finance Corporation. In this moment of market and geopolitical volatility and uncertainty, Parekh believes nonpartisan policy institutions have a particularly important role to play. Parekh is also a devoted New Yorker. He believes the city — where Insight is based, where he and his wife (and partner in all things, including philanthropy) raised their family, where he serves on several boards — is thriving in the post-Covid world. “I feel really bullish about New York,” he says. Parekh’s optimism is also abundant when we speak about the next generation. “Young people give me hope,” he says. And his advice to them: "Have a plan, but follow your passion." Mentioned in this episode: /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/40530755

Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO, Ariel Investments: Everything is Possible 03/12/2026

Mellody Hobson, Co-CEO, Ariel Investments: Everything is Possible In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Mellody Hobson, one of the country’s preeminent investors and business and civic leaders. Hobson is the co-CEO of Ariel Investments, a board director of several Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations, and a nationally recognized advocate for financial literacy and economic inclusion. We begin with a discussion of the formative childhood experiences that would shape Hobson’s personal and professional trajectory. Hobson recalls how, as a young girl on the South Side of Chicago who regularly experienced economic insecurity, she was driven to work very hard and “to understand money” as a path to economic security for herself and for others. “My purpose was sealed very early,” she says. After graduating from Princeton in 1991, Hobson joined the Chicago-based Ariel Investments. In the thirty-five years since, she has traveled from intern to co-CEO, building a $14 billion asset management firm with a mission to “transform the lives of everyone who entrusts us with their financial futures.” Hobson walks us through her evolution as a leader, and describes Ariel’s signature approach to long-term investing in companies and sectors that are “misunderstood, ignored and underfollowed,” where vigorous and original research allows the team to identify mispriced securities and the opportunity to outperform. According to Hobson, Ariel’s success has derived from the principles and practices of active patience (“being patient is really hard, it requires great restraint, great study, great discipline”), bold teamwork, and independent thinking – the focused expertise that supports the “conviction to have a different opinion.” This approach made Ariel a pioneer, first in small cap stocks, where the firm’s founder John Rogers tested the long-term value investment thesis, and later in mid cap and international markets. In 2021, Hobson launched Ariel Alternatives, which included its inaugural private equity fund, Project Black, focused on building to scale minority businesses that will be tier one suppliers to Fortune 500 companies, and Project Level, a new vehicle focused on “changing the game” in women’s sports. Given the seismic and secular shifts in the industry, Hobson believes women’s sports are “the next big growth opportunity… the small cap of sports.” Hobson speaks passionately about all she has learned as a corporate director. Today, she serves on the board of JP Morgan Chase, and was a director of Estée Lauder Companies, DreamWorks Animation, and Starbucks, which she led as chair. She is equally animated by her civic commitments, learning early on it was “part of your job to be of service to others… it was sewn into my DNA.” We discuss the inspiration she finds in her work with a number of nonprofit organizations, including After School Matters, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a new cultural institution she has created with her husband and filmmaker George Lucas. Hobson is fervent about the power of storytelling, and her and Lucas’s belief that “everyone’s story matters.” Hobson has captured part of her own story in the New York bestselling Priceless Facts about Money, an immaculately researched and illustrated children’s book that makes learning about money and finance accessible — and fun. And it is in young people that Hobson sees hope, even in challenging times, as they affirm her faith in the wonder and promise of human potential. “If you believe that is true,” she says, “then everything is possible. Not anything — everything.” Mentioned in this episode , Ariel Founder, Chairman, and Co-CEO (Burton Malkiel, 2024) : , (Mellody Hobson, 2024) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/40326980

Introducing Capital for Good Season Five 03/10/2026

Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa: We Need to Take Responsibility for the World We Want 07/24/2025

Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa: We Need to Take Responsibility for the World We Want In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Maria Ressa, the globally celebrated free speech champion, journalist, entrepreneur, dissident, and winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her work “to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.” Ressa is a co-founder of Rappler, one of the most influential media platforms in the Philippines. For her reporting on the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte, Ressa was threatened, arrested, tried, and convicted of cyberlibel, facing over one hundred years imprisonment. Today Duterte has been arrested by the International Criminal Court and awaits trial in the Hague, Ressa has been cleared of nearly all charges, and her work as a journalist and activist continues as she warns of the very real world challenges of online disinformation. We begin with Ressa’s earliest days in the United States, when her family immigrated in 1973 after martial law had been declared in the Philippines. We discuss the importance of her education in those years, in elementary, high school, and at Princeton, and the support of those who “taught her to keep learning,” lessons that would inform her pursuit of journalism when she returned to the Philippines. “I fell into journalism,” Ressa says, as she found it to be critical “connective tissue between government and the people,” and a way to “hold power to account.” She and three fellow journalists launched Rappler in 2012; by 2016, when Duterte was elected President, Ressa found herself persecuted by the government — threatened, arrested, tried and sentenced to over one hundred years in prison — for reporting on its corrupt and increasingly authoritarian practices. We discuss Ressa’s fight for her rights “as a journalist and a citizen” and her realization that technology could accelerate misinformation, distort truth, and blur the boundaries between the virtual and real world. “A lie told a million times becomes a fact,” she says. Ressa chronicles these experiences in her 2022 memoir and call-to-arms How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for our Future. Ressa cautions about the dangers of and linkages between the weaponization of algorithmically driven disinformation — and illiberalism worldwide. “Without facts you can’t have truth, and without truth you can’t have trust. The only government that exists without trust is a dictatorship: you can’t have journalism or democracy.” In her own work, she and Rappler are building upon the Matrix protocol, a secure, open-source decentralized platform that has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet. Although she is deeply concerned — “I feel like Cassandra and Sisyphus combined,” she says – Ressa also maintains her faith in the power of people to come together for change. “It’s all about community,” she explains. “We are standing on the rubble of the world that was; we need to take responsibility for the world we want. We can build a world that is more just, more equitable, more sustainable; we can do this if we decide to come together, to demand better.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: , (2021) , (Harper Collins, 2022) , (Frontline, 2021) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/37415235

Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller: the Virtuous Cycle of a Successful City 07/10/2025

Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller: the Virtuous Cycle of a Successful City In this episode of Capital for Good with we speak with Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller and recent Mayoral candidate. As Comptroller, Lander serves as the city’s chief financial officer, budget watchdog, auditor, and custodian of the City’s five public pension funds, representing the retirement security — $275 billion in assets — of over 750,000 current and retired public sector workers. As fiduciary, Lander has ensured these assets are invested with a prudent, diversified, long-term approach, while also becoming a national leader on responsible investment when it comes to issues of climate change, worker protections, strong governance, and diversity. At the time of this interview, ranked choice voting had just concluded for the Democratic primary for New York mayor, with Zohran Mamdani winning in an upset over both Lander and former Governor Andrew Cuomo. We begin the conversation with Lander’s early days working in community and economic development at the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Center, where he learned how to use “capital for good:” creative financing for affordable housing, including new ownership and equity models for wealth creation for lower income families, small business support and job training. These issues would inform Landers’ decade in the City Council, where he co-founded the Progressive Caucus and advanced legislation on workers’ rights, tenant protections, affordable housing, education, and public safety. We also explore Lander’s work leading the rezoning of the Gowanus neighborhood (and former Superfund site) to create 8,500 new housing units, nearly half affordable, and affordable art studios and community spaces, as a successful model of inclusive development. Lander discusses the Comptroller’s “most sacred responsibility:” its role as fiduciary of the city’s pension funds, and Lander’s work to deliver retirement security — achieve market rate returns — while stewarding resources “in ways that build on the values New Yorkers share.” We walk through a number of examples where the Comptroller’s engagement as asset owner led to better conditions for workers, greater accountability on corporate net zero commitments, enhanced board oversight, and improved financial returns. His office has also hit its performance targets while expanding the diversity of partner fund managers. “I believe firmly that attending to environmental, social and governance risks, the ESG work, is not just consistent with fiduciary duty, but an essential part of fiduciary duty,” Lander says. In recent years he has worked closely on these issues with other comptrollers and state treasurers across the country. We touch on the New York City mayoral race, the twist and turns of ranked choice voting, and the developments just before the June primary that brought additional attention to the election: Lander’s arrest escorting a migrant out of immigration court, the Office of the Comptroller’s recovery of $80 million illegally removed from a New York City account by DOGE, and Lander and Mamdani’s cross-endorsement. Of the latter, Lander notes, “it wound up unlocking a very lovely response I hadn’t anticipated,” a kind of hopefulness, as voters and young people especially saw that “politics can involve people working together towards shared goals for the city we love.” Lander is clear eyed about the very real challenges facing the New York: affordability, government capacity to deliver a well-run city — to keep streets and subways safe and clean — and to manage budgets and growth in the face of significant headwinds from Washington. This means continuing to strengthen the cross-sector coalition he ran on to create what Dan Doctoroff has called “the virtuous cycle of a successful city,” one that harnesses and celebrates growth while investing in the public goods that make that growth possible and more inclusive, and make opportunity and prosperity more broadly shared. If we can do that, he says, “I know we can keep that virtuous cycle going.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: , (New York Times, 2025) , (New York Times, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/37335530

Emma Bloomberg and Murmuration: Technology, Data, Research, and the Power of Community-driven Civic Engagement 06/25/2025

Emma Bloomberg and Murmuration: Technology, Data, Research, and the Power of Community-driven Civic Engagement In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Emma Bloomberg, the founder and CEO of Murmuration, a nonprofit technology company that works with local organizations to amplify the power of civic engagement by providing the data, tools, and research necessary to build healthier and more equitable communities. Bloomberg has been working with communities and leaders for over 20 years to tackle some of our country’s most pressing challenges. She founded Murmuration with the belief in the power of community driven civic engagement to affect sustainable systems change. We begin the conversation with some of Bloomberg’s formative personal and professional experiences: her childhood “rooted in deep civic engagement,” and the belief that we all have “a responsibility to help make our community a better place;” the opportunity, just out of college, to work on her father Mike Bloomberg’s first mayoral campaign; an early stint in city government focused on the creation of the 311, New York City’s government service information line, and her time at the Robin Hood foundation, New York City’s largest poverty fighting nonprofit and philanthropy. Over the years, and through her work with many community-based organizations, Bloomberg observed how access to better tech and data infrastructure could make their work more efficient, effective, and therefore higher impact. Murmuration set out to solve this problem by serving community organizations with tools, data, and, more recently, research and insights — often tailored to a very local context. We explore critical decision points in Murmuration’s ten-year evolution, including the choice to understand community organization needs and fit with existing products in the marketplace, curate those off the shelf tools and data, identify gaps, acquire the IP of existing tech companies, and only then begin to create tools in-house with requisite partner knowledge and engineering and product development expertise. Bloomberg also explains what it means to be a truly mission driven technology company, electing to incorporate as a nonprofit (versus a fully commercial entity) to better serve the needs of community-based organizations. We end with a discussion of Murmuration’s newest offerings — original research and insights — among them a three-year deep dive into the aspirations, concerns, beliefs and behaviors of Gen Z, including those related to political and civic engagement, and “civic pulse,” a continuous tracking survey that collects daily responses from Americans across the country about how they feel and what they care about, providing real time insights into community well-being and local engagement. Despite the many challenges nationally, Bloomberg remains optimistic. “I am hopeful because I believe in the importance of community organizations; I think of them as the engine of sustainable change,” she says. “Local organizing, in communities, in neighborhoods, that’s where people can feel impact, and that impact is ultimately power.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: (website) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/37125710

Kevin Ryan, the Godfather of NYC Tech 06/12/2025

Kevin Ryan, the Godfather of NYC Tech In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Kevin Ryan, one of New York’s leading internet entrepreneurs and investors, and often called the “Godfather of NYC tech.” Ryan is a co-founder of MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, Pearl Health, and Transcend Therapeutics, and every year founds and invests in new companies through AlleyCorp, the New York based venture fund and incubator. Ryan is also one of New York’s driving civic leaders, serving as vice chair of the Partnership for New York City, a founding board member of Tech:NYC, and a gubernatorial appointee to numerous commissions focused on New York’s economic and civic health and well-being. We begin with Ryan’s early and pioneering days as a 1990s internet entrepreneur. As the president of DoubleClick, he grew the company in two years to 2,000 people across 25 countries, took it public, navigated the dotcom bust and sold it to Google in 2007. We discuss AlleyCorp’s unusual model as early-stage investor and incubator, and Ryan describes AlleyCorp’s most recent investment vertical, economic infrastructure, focused on the economic mobility of low- or middle-income Americans: “the 80% of families who power our economy.” This has meant identifying and backing entrepreneurs pursuing innovations in health equity, fintech, and workforce development with companies like Patch Caregiving, a first of its kind employer sponsored emergency childcare provider for frontline workers. We also explore the growth and vibrancy of New York’s tech industry. New York City is one of the world’s fastest growing and most valuable technology hubs, and Ryan explains how and why it powers the local and regional economy, and measures the city and state can take to continue to foster the ecosystem and its critical contributions to New York’s dynamism and social fabric. Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/36928545

Maria Teresa Kumar: We Market Democracy Every Single Day 05/29/2025

Maria Teresa Kumar: We Market Democracy Every Single Day In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Maria Teresa Kumar, the nationally celebrated social entrepreneur, civic and political operative, journalist, commentator and co-founder and CEO of Voto Latino, the nation’s largest Latino voter registration organization. We begin by discussing some of the formative experiences that shaped Kumar’s passion for politics and civic engagement, including her childhood in a bicultural family and community in Northern California, where she learned how to navigate and bridge difference, real and perceived, to find common cause. In these years and environment, shaped in part by Prop 187 and anti-immigrant sentiment and policy, Kumar learned first-hand how young people in Latino and other immigrant households were critical to mobilizing their families and communities — to become citizens and voters — and in the process dramatically shift electoral outcomes to better reflect community needs. In 2004, with the recognition that Latinos were the second largest demographic group in the country, Kumar and Rosario Dawson founded Voto Latino, centering voter mobilization efforts on young people, and using technology and other pop culture and media tools “to market democracy every single day.” In the twenty years since, Voto Latino has registered over two million voters and played a central role in flipping a number of swing states in various elections. We cover the 2024 election, and the widely held interpretation that Latino voters’ shift to the right contributed to the election of Donald Trump. Kumar notes that while some Latino voters did shift right, many more stayed home in 2024 (38 percent) than in 2020 (27 percent). She believes this reflects broader anxiety and frustration; Latinos, who disproportionately bore the economic toll of the pandemic, and have continued to struggle with persistent affordability challenges and unresolved immigration reform, did not see their needs adequately addressed by either party. Today, Kumar suggests that most Latinos, even those who voted for Trump, believe the President has gone too far, a sentiment reflected in recent survey data from Voto Latino and the Latino Community Foundation. Looking ahead, Kumar argues that it is critical to re-engage voters, and to use “culture at scale” — thoughtful conversations, podcasts, influencers, other creative engagement tools, to address needs and “remind people that when they participate government does work, government can be kind, and it’s the will of the people.” She also notes that at this moment it is critical for citizens to hold government accountable. “2024 was really painful,” Kumar says. “We’re feeling what happens when we don’t participate. But 2026 is right around the corner… We have the ability to inspire, aspire, and to imagine getting to that more perfect union. And that takes all of us.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: , (Voto Latino and Latino Community Foundation, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/36694715

Looking to the Horizon With Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Greg Shell 05/15/2025

Looking to the Horizon With Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Greg Shell In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Greg Shell, a seasoned investor, civic leader, and partner at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, where he leads the firm’s inclusive growth strategy. Over the course of the conversation, we discuss how Shell’s three decades and expertise in investing, and his commitments to creating opportunity and greater economic and social mobility, for many years pursued through board leadership and community and nonprofit engagement, have come together in impact investing, first at Bain Capital, and now at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. Shell explains that he believes deeply in the power of capitalism — the power of the profit model to drive innovation, opportunities for ownership and wealth building, economic growth — and that the current system is failing to deliver broad based economic and social mobility. He notes that stagnant wages, growing income and wealth inequality, and deep and real economic insecurity, are all profound challenges, but ones that must and can be addressed. “Our economy would be bigger and faster growing if more people could participate and contribute fully,” Shell says. This is also the thesis of the private equity strategy he leads at Goldman Sachs Alternatives that invests into affordable and high-quality health care, education and workforce development, and financial inclusion. In each vertical, Shell’s team identifies companies that focus on remedying exclusion as social and economic challenge and market opportunity, where need drives demand, innovation expands access, and both lead to social impact and strong business fundamentals. We walk through two portfolio examples in education (online literacy intervention) and health care (autism services). Despite the turbulence of the current environment, Shell is optimistic. “Human capital is the first, best and greatest asset we have,” he says. “Investing in human capital is always the right decision, and if we do it the right way” can deliver extraordinary returns, on every dimension. Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/36512780

Anna-Lisa Miller and Ownership Works: Reimagining Equity to Build Wealth for All 05/01/2025

Anna-Lisa Miller and Ownership Works: Reimagining Equity to Build Wealth for All In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Anna-Lisa Miller, the Executive Director of Ownership Works, and a long time advocate of economic inclusion, empowerment and mobility. Miller started her career in corporate law at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, and transitioned to the nonprofit sector – the Kohala Center and Project Equity – to pursue her passion for creating opportunities that uplift workers and families. Today, at Ownership Works, she leads an organization and movement focused on employee ownerships models that “reimagine equity to build wealth for all.” In 2024, Miller was named as one of Business Insider’s top 10 business leaders spearheading industry-transforming change. In this wide ranging interview, we learn how Miller’s commitment to finding pathways to economic opportunity and mobility for workers and families is rooted in her childhood experiences; she moved to the U.S. at a young age and was raised by a single mother who rebuilt her career as a nurse, supporting three children paycheck to paycheck -- and never far from financial insecurity. Trained as a corporate lawyer, Miller moved into the nonprofit sector to test various models of employee ownership and economic mobility before meeting Pete Stavros, who had been successfully experimenting with owner equity in various portfolio companies he oversaw at KKR. Both understood the broader potential of the approach as a way to build employee wealth and improve business performance, and in 2021 formally launched Ownership Works (OW). Today, with 30 employees, nearly 100 partners (including 37 private equity firms, publicly traded companies, professional service firms, institutional investors, labor groups and foundations), and 130 companies across a wide range of industries implementing the model, OW aims to create $30 billion in wealth by 2030 and create proof points that influence how companies across the private sector harness the power of employee engagement and ownership. Miller walks us through various components of the OW model, sharing the example of Charter Next Generation, an Illinois manufacturing company that has used employee ownership to improve substantially employee engagement, retention and company profitability. She hopes that the long-standing bipartisan support for employee ownership as a path to economic inclusion and opportunity serves the movement well in this moment. In the meantime, she and OW are focused on collecting additional data and case studies that demonstrate employee ownership’s value and feasibility, to encourage broader adoption and new norms in business. “You hear a lot about win-wins,” Miller says. “This truly is.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: New York Times January 2024 /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/36219470

Tom Steyer: Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War 04/17/2025

Tom Steyer: Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with veteran investor and climate activist Tom Steyer. Over twenty-five years, Steyer founded and ran Farallon Capital Management, a $36 billion multi-strategy global investment firm. In 2012 he stepped away from Farallon to dedicate his time, resources, and energy to mobilizing climate action: clean air and energy initiatives in California; climate focused ballot initiatives in numerous states; youth voter engagement and mobilization (NextGen America); and a 2020 Presidential run largely focused on the climate crisis. Today, Steyer is the co-executive chair of Galvanize Climate Solutions, a climate-focused investment firm, and the author of Cheaper, Faster, Better: How We’ll Win the Climate War. We begin the interview by discussing Steyer’s parents, both civically engaged members of the Greatest Generation. In his father’s case, a lawyer who served in the Navy and then as a prosecutor at Nuremberg. Steyer describes World War II as a crucible moment for Americans — galvanizing collective action and a sense of being part of something larger than oneself. For Steyer, the climate fight is a similar calling. We discuss why, despite current political headwinds, the momentum behind the climate revolution — the transition to net zero via the development and adoption of low carbon technologies — is very much alive, well, and accelerating. In Steyer’s view, this is because of the dramatic decline in costs of renewables — solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of energy — and because applied technologies like batteries and electric vehicles continue to improve in quality and cost, driving demand. “This is not eat your gruel,” he says. “It’s cheaper, faster, better. When you put eight billion people on a problem, they solve it.” We also explore promising new technologies coming on-line, from geothermal energy and AI optimization of the electric grid to geosynthetic seawalls. While these new technologies will enable the transition, Steyer notes that “climate capitalism” also requires new rules and policies to speed innovation and deployment; ultimately this means paying for carbon pollution. He argues that despite objections to the idea of a “tax,” people are already paying — in the form of destruction to homes, businesses, livelihoods, health — though often it is the most vulnerable, those who have contributed the least to the problem, in the United States and around the world, who bear the cost. We conclude with a call to action. Historically, Steyer reminds us, “we’ve chosen to do the right things, even when they’re hard, and that has always paid off for us, and it will always pay off for us. That is who we are, and that is where this world is going. This revolution is happening. Our job, as Americans, is to be at the forefront.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this podcast: , (Spiegel and Grau, 2024) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/36136695

Michael Posner, Conscience Incorporated: The Role of Business and Investment in Protecting Human Rights 04/03/2025

Michael Posner, Conscience Incorporated: The Role of Business and Investment in Protecting Human Rights In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Michael Posner, the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, director of the school’s Center for Business and Human Rights, a long-time leader in the field, luminary thinker, advocate, former State Department Official, and the author of the new book, Conscience Incorporated. We begin with Posner’s early interests in international human rights issues, sparked in law school when he was tasked with investigating atrocities in Uganda under Idi Amin. He lays out the principals of early, post-World War II and UN inspired human rights law focused on universality, and the responsibility of governments to promote, protect and enforce human rights. Notably absent from this early framework is the role of business. Posner explains that his interest in the intersection of human rights took shape when he began to observe that large multinational corporations had a critical role to play, particularly when they operated in weak states that lacked the ability to protect human rights. We discuss why companies should care, fundamentally, about human rights on ethical dimensions (“outsourcing might be a smart business strategy, but you can’t outsource responsibility if you’re the main economic beneficiary,”) and because there are material costs that can arise from irresponsible practices, often reputational crises and/or regulation. We explore the deficiencies of various business frameworks: how and why Milton Friedman’s shareholder primacy worldview fails to account for environmental and social externalities and a broader set of stakeholders; how and why ESG conflate environmental and social considerations and emphasize risk rather than meaningful performance on issues like climate change or worker protections. Posner suggests that this moment of backlash against all things ESG, DEI and “woke capitalism” offers us an opportunity to do better. We touch on sometimes complex tensions between climate change and human rights concerns, acknowledging that climate change can only be solved if we transition to a lower carbon economy, with the scale up of renewable energy and the development of technologies like electric vehicles, which in turn rely on things like batteries. We know that today batteries are reliant on inputs like critical minerals, long mined in ways and places rife with human rights challenges, and today often controlled by Chinese companies. China is also the world’s largest and lowest cost producer of solar panels, and much of that production occurs in Xinjiang, with forced labor of the Uyghur ethnic minority. Posner discusses a number of ways to better integrate climate and human rights considerations. Before opening the floor to audience questions, we discuss the evolution of technology and human rights issues. When Posner was at the State Department from 2010 to 2012, he had a front tow seat to the Arab Spring and the “Facebook Revolution,” witnessing how activists used social media to fight authoritarianism. Although he says he still believes in the power of technology to open up political discourse, he has become much more concerned about issues of data privacy, surveillance, harmful violent and incendiary content, information and disinformation, and ways in which companies try to shield themselves with first amendment (to which they are not legally subject) to avoid more vigorous content moderation or human rights engagement. We conclude with the role of corporate leaders when it comes to human rights. While Posner notes he is typically conservative about how much executives should speak out on specific issues, he believes strongly that “business leaders need to be attentive and active if there are fundamental threats to our democracy.” This episode of Capital for Good was recorded as part of Social Impact Week 2025, a week of social impact-related events for the Columbia Business School community, organized by the Social Enterprise Club, Green Business Club, Community Impact Club, and LEO Impact Fund. Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/35959740

Janno Lieber, Chairman and CEO, the New York MTA: “Never Bet Against New York” 03/20/2025

Janno Lieber, Chairman and CEO, the New York MTA: “Never Bet Against New York” In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Janno Lieber, the chairman and CEO of New York’s MTA, one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most complex public transit systems. “New York is my passion,” Lieber says, and the throughline of his career. Lieber, a lifelong New Yorker, business leader and transit veteran — he was a transportation advisor to Mayor Koch, an Assistant Secretary of Transportation in the Clinton Administration, and led the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site after September 11 attacks — talks about the complexity of overseeing a public transportation system that spans a 12-county, 25-million person region: 6,400 subway cars, 472 stations, 5,700 buses, and two major commuter rails. Lieber notes that the success of the region — it is the economic powerhouse of the local state and much of the national economy — rests on density and mobility. “The ability to get around New York only works if you have great mass transit,” he says; the MTA moves more than six million people per day. For users, trains, buses and subways are 15 percent the cost of owning an automobile. “The magic of transit,” Lieber explains, “is it is one of the very few things that makes living in New York City and the region affordable.” We discuss congestion pricing, the decades in making the policy to charge automobiles $9 a day to enter the most congested part of the city to reduce traffic, improve emissions, air quality, health and safety, and help finance maintenance and upgrades to the 100 year old transit system. The program launched January 5 and early data is very promising: a 10 to 20 percent reduction in traffic; significantly reduced travel times for drivers from New Jersey, Long Island, Queens and the Bronx, and along some of the city’s most crowded thoroughfares (i.e., Canal Street, 34th Street, 42nd Street and 57th); increased transit ridership; and revenue generated for critical improvements: elevators and ramps to make all subway stations accessible and ADA compliant, new train cars and electric buses, new tracks, signals and power systems, mitigation efforts in areas that may see spillover traffic. Lieber notes that the economic benefits are already observable in the zone itself: increased pedestrian traffic, an uptick in retail, restaurant and Broadway sales, and promising indices in commercial leasing — “a vote of confidence” in the program. For all these reasons the business community has long supported the policy. The MTA is equally pleased to see high rates of customer satisfaction coming from drivers with reduced commute times, which Lieber believes will also be important to counter the recent political opposition from Washington. Lieber reminds us that congestion pricing has been successfully tested in the courts, and there is nothing in the federal law or program design that would allow for its rollback. We also speak about how central public safety, real and perceived, is to the economic and civic health of the city. “Public transit is where six million New Yorkers every day form their opinion about whether government works, and to some extent whether this community, this experiment in diversity and tolerance and economic dynamism, is working,” Lieber says. While the data show that overall crime in the city is down, crime in the subway is down, and subway crime accounts for less than two percent of overall crime, high profile and frightening crimes, and the city’s larger mental health, substance use and homeless crises that are acutely manifest in the subway system, play an outsized play role in the public’s sense of security, order and well-being. “Not only to the subways have to be safe, they have to feel safe,” Lieber insists, and we discuss numerous efforts the MTA is taking in coordination with other city agencies to address these issues. We conclude with the resilience of New Yorkers in the face of adversity — the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the September 11 attacks, the dotcom burst, and the financial crisis, Hurricane Sandy, the pandemic — and how the city “bounces back even better” to become a better version of itself. "Never bet against New York,” is Lieber’s motto. Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode , (The New York Times, 2025) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/35661850

Introducing Capital for Good Season Four 03/06/2025

Investing in Women, Investing in Our Future 03/13/2024

Investing in Women, Investing in Our Future In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with three inspiring leaders in women’s health, Erika Seth Davies, Jade Kearney, and Flory Wilson, each pioneering advances in reproductive and maternal health, and each using business, investment, engagement, and advocacy as levers for social change. Davies is the CEO of Rhia Ventures, a nonprofit that advances reproductive and maternal health equity by leveraging capital to focus on the needs, experiences, and perspectives of historically marginalized people in decision making. Rhia ventures activities include venture capital investing (via RH Capital), ecosystem building, corporate engagement and advocacy, and narrative change. Wilson is the founder and CEO of Reproductive & Maternal Health Compass (RMH) Compass, a nonprofit focused on the role employers play in access to reproductive and maternal health, and on providing companies with the tools, resources, support, and recognition necessary to offer best in class RMH benefits for all workers. Kearney is the co-founder and CEO of She Matters, a digital health platform designed to improve maternal morbidity through cultural competency and technology. Focused in particular on improving health outcomes for Black women, and on the epidemic of Black maternal morbidity, She Matters is a B2B company that offers health providers a culturally competent certification program tailored to the specific nuances and challenges facing Black women in the US health care system. Over the course of this conversation, we touch on the personal and professional experiences that have informed each of these leaders’ work in health equity and access. We also explore how current headwinds and retrenchment — on reproductive and maternal health, on racial equity and inclusion, and on corporate activism — motivate them and have shaped their innovative business models. “If anyone says entrepreneurship is easy,” Kearney says, “point them in my direction. Social entrepreneurship is sometimes gut wrenching because you’re so close to the problem. But change is also soul feeding because you’re so close to the problem.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/30294053

Lise Strickler ’86 and Mark Gallogly ’86: Three Cairns Group, the Climate Crisis, and Climate Solutions 02/28/2024

Lise Strickler ’86 and Mark Gallogly ’86: Three Cairns Group, the Climate Crisis, and Climate Solutions In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Lise Strickler ’86 and Mark Gallogly ’86, the co-founders of Three Cairns Group, a mission driven investment and philanthropic firm focused on the climate crisis. In the years since Columbia Business School, where they met in 1986, Mark has worked in investing, philanthropy, and public policy; as co-founder of Centerbridge Partners, an investment firm with over $30 billion of assets under management; and before at The Blackstone Group. Mark’s work in public service has included two stints under President Obama, and most recently at the US State Department as an Expert Senior Advisor to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry. Lise has extensive experience in the climate advocacy sector and has spent the last 20 years working with local, state, and national organizations to advance public policy and build momentum for scalable solutions to the world’s climate crisis, including as a board member of the Environmental Defense Fund and co-chair of their 501(c)4 political advocacy partner, EDF Action; on the leadership council of the Yale School of the Environment; and on the advisory boards of Environmental Advocates NY, the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy, Columbia University’s Climate School, the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, and the Adirondack Trail Improvement Society. In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover a number of the challenges — and promising solutions — to the climate crisis. We begin with their respective “climate journeys,” including for both formative childhood experiences in nature and the outdoors. Lise credits her parents for “passing on the values of hard work, conservation, and leaving the world better than you found it,” and recalls how the environmental activism of the 1970s, including the passage of important legislation like the Clean Air and Water Acts, shaped her understanding of environmental issues and the potential to address them. We discuss the genesis of the Three Cairns Group, and some of its first major initiatives, each focused, in different ways, on developing ideas and climate solutions that are potentially scalable, and then working with partners across sectors and across the world to implement. For example, Three Cairns has recently launched Allied Climate Partners (ACP), a platform that has aggregated capital from philanthropy, governments, development finance institutions and the private sector to support early-stage climate projects and businesses in emerging markets, including in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, Africa, and India. We also explore why Mark and Lise believe that universities, as centers of learning, “creators of new knowledge that advance civilization,” and places that produce the leaders for tomorrow are natural partners for their work on climate. We touch on various efforts they are involved in at Columbia and Yale. Finally, Lise and Mark remind us that, while the challenges of the climate crisis are many, there are number of breakthroughs that motivate them to keep moving forward: some technological, like MethaneSat, a new $100 million methane tracking satellite, or the falling costs of renewables; some policy related, like the passage of the federal Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, that are driving trillions of dollars into climate, or more locally the promise of congestion pricing in places like New York City that will reduce emissions and elevate the importance of public transportation as a climate and equity issue. Lise and Mark note that communicating these gains, and framing climate challenges as ones we have solutions to – and agency in – is critical to the tackling the crisis, particularly for young people “who want things to be better, and want to make them better.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/30116168

Shaun Donovan: Home, Community, and the Affordable Housing Crisis 02/14/2024

Shaun Donovan: Home, Community, and the Affordable Housing Crisis In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Shaun Donovan, one of the country’s most important leaders — and lifelong advocates — for housing, economic development, and shared prosperity. Donovan has worked at the highest levels of government — as Secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama and as Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development in New York City — overseeing large scale public-private partnerships. Today he approaches that work from Enterprise, where he leads the nation’s only nonprofit that brings together in one place housing solutions, capital, and community development. We begin with some of Donovan’s formative personal and professional experiences that motivated his lifelong commitment to housing. Growing up in New York City during a time of crises, with high levels of street homelessness and neighborhoods across the city severely challenged, Donovan was drawn to work at community-based organizations focused on homelessness, rebuilding communities, and financing community revitalization. We discuss how these experiences would inform his years in government, and his understanding of the role of the public sector. “I am a deep believer in the power of government and the need for a strong government role in the service of the public good,” Donovan says. He notes that, in particular, government can make foundational investments in things like infrastructure or basic scientific research that lay the groundwork for much broader economic prosperity, and can set the “rules of the road,” for commercial market players. He also underscores the importance of cross sector partnerships: Government can scale innovations tested by the nonprofit and private sectors or shape policy that responds to community-based movement building. Donovan’s forty-year commitment to housing is rooted in the sector’s “unique” role in people’s lives — where people live and their quality of housing — affects larger opportunities and well-being: schooling, health, safety, and employment. Housing has also become the most expensive thing in most people’s lives: more than half of US renters spend over 30 percent of income on rent, closer to 50 percent for lower income Americans. We discuss how today’s affordability crisis has led to record levels of street homelessness, overcrowding, evictions, and instability in communities across the United States — the worst Donovan has seen in his lifetime. The high cost of housing also prevents individuals and families from moving to higher paying jobs; limited economic mobility in turn exacerbates economic and political segregation and polarization. Despite these challenges, Donovan is encouraged by important developments at the national, state, and local level. We discuss what he calls the “New New Deal:” the trillions of dollars the federal government has deployed to infrastructure and climate (via the Inflation Reduction Act), political momentum at the state level to increase the supply of affordable housing, and a wellspring of housing innovation in communities across the US. At Enterprise, Donovan and colleagues take on all of these issues, with a particular focus on racial equity and building resilience and upward mobility. Founded forty years ago, Enterprise today invests approximately $10 billion a year into communities ($64 billion cumulatively to build or preserve 950,000 homes), owns and manages 13,000 affordable homes, and is the country’s largest housing policy and advocacy organization. All of these activities involve partnerships. For example, Enterprise has recently joined forces with LISC, Habitat for Humanity, the United Way, and Rewiring America to apply for $9.5 billion from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund to work with 156 communities across the country to decarbonize affordable housing, invest in resilience, and ensure an equitable low carbon transition. Enterprise also oversees a variety of innovation challenges to support effective housing solutions developed by community-based organizations across the United States. “We have solutions, we know what works,” Donovan says. “I think this is the moment, potentially, when we come together… to build a national movement to make housing a critical part of how we support families in this country.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/29776763

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI 01/31/2024

Dr. Fei-Fei Li: The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford and the Denning Co-Director of Stanford’s Human Centered AI-Institute. Dr. Li has been called the godmother of artificial intelligence and has emerged as one of the country’s leading scientists — and humanists. She is also the author of the new book, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. We begin by discussing how and why Li employs a “double helix” structure in her book to tell two interlacing stories: the evolution of a new field of science and her own coming of age as a scientist. Together, they form an homage to the intellectual foundations of her work, and to the teachers, mentors, and family members whose sacrifices made her work possible. We explore how the very act of writing the book serves to introduce an underrepresented voice — that of a woman, an immigrant, a person of color — into the world of artificial intelligence and science more broadly. Li believes strongly that “progress and discovery come from every corner,” and throughout her career has worked towards “lifting all walks of life.” In explaining just what she means by “human centered AI,” Li explains that there is “nothing artificial about artificial intelligence.” As a “tool made by and for people,” she argues AI should be used to make people’s lives work better. Li describes any number of extraordinary and beneficial applications of AI, including those in neuroscience, the social and political sciences, business, education, climate change, and health care, from research drug discovery to diagnosis, treatment, and delivery. We also touch on some of the major risks of AI. While Li believes it is important to examine the longer term and potentially existential threats of AI — the current and popular pre-occupation with sentience and machine overlords – she is more concerned with the technology’s urgent (and potentially catastrophic) social risks: significant biases in data and algorithms, issues of privacy, the problems of misinformation and disinformation, and the profound and uneven economic disruptions that the technology can bring about. “AI can grow the global pie of productivity,” Li says, “but there is a difference between increased productivity and shared prosperity.” Li also warns of severe levels of underinvestment by the public sector in AI. She has worked closely with the state of California, the federal government, and the UN to encourage more of a “moonshot” mentality when it comes to resources for blue sky innovation, and for the development of governance and guardrails essential for public safety and trust. Li concludes by encouraging others to follow their own North Stars. “My North Star hasn’t changed, it is still AI, but it is the science with an expanded aperture: the greater North Star of doing good that is human centered.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/29664623

Suzanne Nossel: Dare to Speak 01/17/2024

Suzanne Nossel: Dare to Speak In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, and one of the country’s most prominent experts and voices on free speech, free expression, and human rights. Nossel has held leadership roles in government, the nonprofit and private sectors, and is the author of the award-winning book . We begin with some of Nossel’s formative personal and professional experiences that shaped her passion for human rights, including participating as a young person in the movement to free Soviet Jews in the 1980s, and her years after college in South Africa during the country’s early transition from Apartheid to democracy. Both influenced what would become a throughline throughout her career — “an impulse to advocate for people who take great risks, who assert themselves, who challenge authority,” whether that was leading important initiatives at the State Department under President Obama, at the UN under President Clinton, or at civil society organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and now PEN America. Nossel walks us through a kind of “free speech and free expression” 101. She explains that while much of the important conversation about free speech centers on the First Amendment, and therefore on protections against government infringement on speech, more broadly free speech is also the foundational right for all other rights in a free and democratic society, the “catalyst for a range of social goods.” Nossel reminds us that the open exchange of ideas allows for deliberation, persuasion, debate, accountability, the ability to make better policies, choose better leaders, and advance scientific progress artistic creativity; freedom of expression is “an underwriter of so many other movements, the ability to advocate for… women's rights, climate justice, racial justice.” She worries about a rising generation becoming alienated from the principle of free speech, seeing free speech at odds with commitments to diversity, inclusion, and pluralism — when in fact they are mutually supportive and reinforcing. We discuss many of the ways Nossel and her PEN America colleagues aim to serve as “guarantors of free speech and open discourse” through work to “celebrate and defend freedom of expression worldwide.” Some of this takes the form of enabling and amplifying lesser heard voices like Dreamers or incarcerated writers; some through awards, festivals, and public programming celebrating a “big tent” of writers and voices that in turn supports PEN’s free expression and advocacy work, including the defense of persecuted writers around the world, litigation, i.e., the recent federal lawsuit in Escambia County, Florida challenging book bans, or warnings on the dangers of education gag orders. For years, PEN America has also worked on issues of campus free speech, a topic we explore in light of the recent protests and crises of university leadership. Nossel hopes that today’s campus convulsions have brought about a recognition that universities need to put in place deliberate, intentional training and inculcation of a culture of free speech, open discourse, and academic freedom to support the diversity of experience, opinion, and perspective that makes universities “catalysts for understanding and growth.” We also touch on the large and “messy” issues of online speech, the ways it can be weaponized, the challenges of disinformation, of businesses built on algorithms that prioritize inflammatory content — that are not governed as public entities or liable for most posted speech, and of the lag in appropriate regulation. “The best we can do is experiment,” Nossel says. To date, that experimentation has included important new EU regulations, and efforts from the tech companies themselves to improve content moderation. Nossel herself sits on the Meta oversight board, a group that works to apply human rights principles to adjudicate complex content moderation quandaries and dilemmas. While deeply concerned about speech issues — particularly the problems of misinformation in an election year (in the United States and around the world), Nossel is also hopeful there is increased recognition, on the political left and right “that each has a stake in speech.” “Speech really should be an issue that sits above politics, and for a long time it was,” she says. “My hope is that we can go back to that when it comes to the nature of our discourse.” Thanks for Listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode “,” (PEN America, 2024) “”(Suzanne Nossel, Wall Street Journal, 2023) , (Suzanne Nossel, Dey Street Books, 2020) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/29516353

Luis Miranda: Relentless 01/03/2024

Luis Miranda: Relentless In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with Luis Miranda, one of New York, and the country’s, most dynamic cross-sector leaders, with more than four decades of experience in government, business, politics and advocacy, community development, and the arts. Miranda is the founding partner of the MirRam Group, founding president of the Hispanic Federation, and board chair of the Latino Victory Fund, the Public Theater, and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance. In the words of his son Lin-Manuel, Miranda is relentless. We begin with Miranda’s childhood and formative years in Vega Alta, a small town in Puerto Rico where he was born and raised before leaving for New York to pursue a PhD in clinical psychology at NYU. Although he left Puerto Rico as a very young man, the place has remained central to his identity and family — and, as beautifully told in the award-winning HBO documentary Siempre, Luis, a place he returns to regularly, including to lead much of the rebuilding effort after hurricanes Irma and Maria. Once settled in New York, Miranda discovered that work as a clinical psychologist didn’t suit him, but the city “fit like a glove.” Inspired by his parents, who were deeply engaged in public service, Miranda became a community activist, first via nonprofit organizations, then in government when he “came to understand the role that politics can play in changing lives, making communities better.” Miranda would go on to serve in three Mayoral administrations — Koch, Dinkins and Giuliani — and became increasingly involved in local, state, and national politics, helping to elect officials to the New York City Council, the New York State Assembly, and all of New York’s recent representatives in the US Senate: Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Schumer, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Miranda also chairs Latino Victory, focused on building power in the Latino community by electing more Latinos to office. We end with a discussion of the arts — and the ways in which Miranda’s commitment to the arts, politics, community activism, and inclusion all come together. His many recent and large-scale arts projects include bringing Hamilton to Puerto Rico as part of the hurricane recovery effort, leading the restoration of the United Palace theater in Washington Heights, and chairing the board of The Public Theater, where he is leading its Fund for Free Theater campaign. “The arts feed the soul; they bring people together,” Miranda says. “We have to ensure they are accessible.” Thanks for listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this episode (Luis Miranda) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/29167678

Sonal Shah, CEO, the Texas Tribune: Intrapreneurship — and Finding Common Ground 12/20/2023

David Leonhardt: Ours Was the Shining Future 12/06/2023

David Leonhardt: Ours Was the Shining Future In this episode of Capital for Good we speak with David Leonhardt, senior writer at the New York Times where he writes its flagship newsletter, “The Morning,” and author of the important new book, Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. At the Times Leonhardt has been Washington bureau chief, op-ed columnist, staff writer for the Magazine, and founding editor of “The Upshot.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2011, Leonhardt is one of the country’s most insightful thinkers and analysts. We begin the conversation with some of Leonhardt’s own origin story: his family’s experience with the American Dream, including that of his grandfather who fled the antisemitic persecution of wartime Europe for the United States, married, and started life in the US in 1940 on the cusp of a long period of prosperity and opportunity — one, too, of terrible discrimination, racism, sexism — but a society that, for most Americans, would deliver on the promise of the American Dream “that life gets better over time.” “I feel a real gratitude for this country, not by any means blind to its great faults,” Leonhardt says, and expresses deep concern that our collective sense of optimism about the future has faded for so many as progress — on earnings, health and wellbeing, life expectancy – has slowed “to a crawl for most Americans,” while income and wealth inequality have soared. We discuss Leonhardt’s belief that capitalism “works better than any alternative we’ve found… but only a certain type of capitalism”: one that acknowledges that the market is a good and strong force “with consistent shortcomings” that, unchecked by government interventions, can produce significant inequality, or global challenges like climate change. Leonhardt describes how a positive “democratic capitalism” thrived in the post war period for a number of reasons, among them the rise of organized labor that significantly reduced inequality and increased material living standards for lower- and middle-income Americans, and a culture of business leadership championed by executives who believed they were “trustees of the common welfare,” stewards of a kind of high wage, low inequality capitalism that shared the goal with government and labor of creating “a more prosperous America to lead the world.” Leonhardt notes that this era also saw significant government investment in public goods — basic science and technology research (that was then taken up by the private sector), physical infrastructure (i.e., roads and railways), social infrastructure (i.e., education) — with the foresight and political will to use “some of today’s resources to make life better tomorrow.” Today, Leonhardt laments, we have reverted to a kind of “rough and tumble” capitalism with massive declines in union membership and power, a more self-interested corporate culture, and a stagnation that comes from decades of underinvestment. We end our discussion on a note of optimism, “not that we are going to fix our problems,” Leonhardt says, “but that we can fix our problems.” He believes that the decline of the American Dream over the past half century can be reversed, and that the dream can restored by a strong and diverse grassroots political movement dedicated “to protecting that dream” and improving living standards of most Americans. Leonhardt cites any number of unlikely successes in our history of social progress — on the political left and labor – that have been achieved through grassroots organizing and coalition building. He is confident, or at least hopeful, “the future can be different from the past.” Thanks for listening! Subscribe to Capital for Good on , , , , or wherever you get your podcasts. Drop us a line at . Mentioned in this Episode , (The New York Times, 2023) , (The Atlantic, 2023) /episode/index/show/tamercenter/id/28931953

Capital for Good

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