Insights
Insights
Ellis Carr & Gary Cunningham Discuss
In September 2023, the Momentus Capital team gathered in Washington, D.C. for its annual meeting to discuss the organization’s strategy for the coming year. As part of that process, President & CEO Ellis Carr hosted a discussion with Board Chair Gary Cunningham. In their wide-ranging conversation, they discussed Gary’s long history working on community development issues, the importance of financial inclusion, the need to embed the principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into this work, and the unique and innovative solutions that the Momentus Capital branded family of organizations are delivering to disrupt the financial sector.
We invite you to watch their conversation or read the accompanying transcript.
*Please note that this transcript has been amended for clarity from the original audio.
We are really fortunate to have Gary with us today. You’ll hear a lot more about him soon. Gary, just so you know, one of the things that I talked to the team about yesterday was reflecting back to 2021 and how far we’ve come.
What you all probably don’t know is that at the same time, our organizations came together, the boards came together as well. So, a subset of Capital Impacts’ board came together with a subset of CDC Small Business Finance’s board and we also brought on three independent directors who had no legacy affiliation. Gary was one of those three, and he’s been with us since 2021. As Nicholas just mentioned, he’s risen to become the board chair, which I’m forever grateful for. Kurt [Chilcott] is still very much involved on the board side as well. He’s the vice chair. Gary and Kurt are really good friends too, and I treasure that as well. So Gary, welcome again.
Thank you. Ellis. Good morning everybody. Now I’m going to do something with you. I want you guys to be with me on this. Can I get your agreement? You’re going to be with me on this,
Okay? So one of the things I want y’all to do is When you get excited about something, I want you to stand up and give a standing ovation. Are you ready? Alright, so we’re going to practice. Okay? You have to have some energy in this room, right? So why don’t we practice? Okay? So when I say here’s your president and C E O, Ellis Carr…
[Applause]
We’re going to do that because you’ve got to have energy to do this work. And this is hard work you all are doing here, right?
I’ve been in this work a long time, and there are times when you have to deal with complex problems. There is no easy answer — it’s not a linear kind of thing. And so as you’re thinking through these issues — and all of you are in different places in the organization and have different complexities within your work — part of it is cheering yourself on as you do this work. And so I’m just going to steal the stage for a minute, because Ellis has some questions for me.
You’re my boss. Go ahead.
I want to just tell a little bit of a story. So there was a person — some of you might know who he is and Ellis has heard me talk about him before. His name is Joseph Campbell. Anybody heard of him? Give a round of applause. [Applause]
Joseph Campbell was a professor of comparative religions, and he went around the world studying stories of native people in all parts of the world. He went to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and he studied the stories of Native Americans here in North America. What he found was that they’re all the same story.
Joseph Campbell’s also known for something else. And that is that he was the creator, with George Lucas, of the Force in Star Wars. Some of you know what that is, right?
So, the idea is that we all have the same stories we’ve been telling for many years. There’s a story of the flood. That’s in almost every religion, this flood, and a great fire, and all these stories are the same. And [Campbell] also wrote a book called Heroes with a Thousand Faces, where he explains that these myths — and Star Wars — are about being a hero.
The idea is that you are the hero of your own journey. It’s called the monomyth. If you think about any of these great stories about heroes, they start off the same way: somebody’s born, something happens, and they get help along the way. They have to go through some struggle. They take on whatever it is they were meant to take on, and they bring back something to help the community that they’re in.
Each one of you is the hero of your own journey right now. It’s your movie. I’m just a supporting character in your movie. I’m just up here trying to encourage you to think about your story as that of a hero. The work you’re doing now, the work that we as an entity are doing, is transforming the lives of folks who don’t see this kind of opportunity. Some of them see it, some of them don’t. But we’re trying to really change this system that has operated for so long that has left so many of us out. No matter where you are in the organization, you are contributing to making this society work equally well for everyone. Isn’t that what we want? Yes. Is that what we want? Standing ovation!
[Applause]
Your work matters. What you do matters. So, Ellis, I’ll stop there.
I’m hanging out by the fireplace and Gary is starting a revolution. I love it. So we spent the greater part of this week on the theme of connection and One Momentus. That really starts and ends with personal connections and getting to know people for who they are. Tell us a little bit about who you are, Gary. You’ve been at this work for some time in the community, economic development, and justice spaces. Tell people who you are and how you came to this work.
Well, I don’t want to tell you the long story, so I’ll give you the short version. So I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And the community I grew up in is the one you saw with George Floyd. My neighborhood is that neighborhood — my grandmother lived right on those four corners. My mother and all the people in my life grew up there. In fact, I went to the church right there on that corner. So if you’ve seen that area, you’ve seen where I grew up. It was a poor, mixed community, people of color and Black people. It became more Black over the years that I was there, just like many communities. And I grew up in a family that was really involved with the community. We helped create a community garden, and when I was 18, I started a co-op grocery store that I ran through college.
A lot of my college life was running this cooperative grocery store where people in the community had a say over what they would eat and why, and could get it at a lower price. It was a powerful experience. There were about 15 or 20 of us who worked in this grocery store, young people like myself. All of us did well in life, in part because we were a part of that process. It helped us learn how to stock shelves, how to get up in the morning, how to do the books. That was the beginning of my career if you will. And I’ve done a lot of things since then.
But I think that in terms of really getting into this work, it started when I worked on a report called People of Color and Women in Real Estate Occupations when I was at the University of Minnesota. This was a long time ago. And I started seeing these inequities, and I found out that I love research and I love doing analyses. I did several of these reports, and then all of a sudden, I was working.
I got a job as the deputy director of the civil rights department for the city of Minneapolis and did that for about six years, working on complaint investigations, contract compliance, affirmative action, and related issues. I saw that that wasn’t enough to change systems of inequity. And so, after going to graduate school, I started working on what I saw as part of the issue: the fact that in many cases, low and moderate-income communities lack the economic ability to keep resources in their communities.
I worked with the Dudley Street Initiative in Boston doing community development work while I was in graduate school. But — and I’m skipping a lot of years in between — the pivotal change came when I started working as a vice president of programs for the Northwest Area Foundation. At that time, the foundation was focused on poverty in an eight-state region, and it provided resources to Native nations, rural areas, and urban areas. After we did that work for a while, we went back and evaluated and found that the work that actually moved communities forward was the economic development work. That was where we could actually see movement in terms of economic possibilities for people.
That’s what got me involved with CDFIs. I started funding the Native American CDFI network and CDFIs throughout that region.. I had learned a lot at that point and worked in Native Nations for a long time, and started seeing that I wanted to do [economic development work] myself instead of working for a foundation that looked at what other people did and decided whether or not to fund it. So I went back home to Minneapolis and got involved with an organization called the Metropolitan Economic Development Association (MEDA) that focused on entrepreneurs of color. MEDA’s claim to fame was that we grew some of the largest businesses of color in the country and became the top minority business organization in the nation.
I then ran the federal procurement center for the Minority Business Development Agency for a while and did a bunch of [work] like that. But at the root of it, I saw one question: how do we actually move the needle? How do we ensure that everybody, no matter who they are, if they work hard and do the right things, can fully participate in our society, move up the ladder, have a great life, take care of their family, and have economic security? I could go on and on, as Ellis knows, but I’m going to stop there.
Thank you, Gary, for that. Just so you all know, and I mentioned this before, Kurt and Gary are good friends, and you guys can probably see that they both write poetry. One of the things that I like and take from Gary, and from Kurt as well, is their ability to rise up and look at the world with a more macro view. Gary, you talked a lot about economic inequality, and I would love for you just to kind of frame what you believe the issues around economic inequality are in this country. The staff and the board have heard you talk about targeted universalism and how that connects to the issue and the challenge around economic inequality.
Well, shifting gears — doing this work for a long time, I’ve done a lot of different projects with a person named john a. powell at the University of California Berkeley. He runs the Other and Belonging Center and he’s one of the founders. [john], Angela Glover Blackwell, and Manuel Pasters are really the framers of what we know now as the equity movement in this country. I had the opportunity to work with him on this issue in the nineties, and one of the things we learned was that not everybody buys into or feels a part of the movement for creating a more just and equitable society, in part because we frame these things in zero-sum terms.
When I say zero-sum, I mean you win, I lose. And that’s how it’s being framed out there.
John had been working on this and came up with the idea that we could change the frame so everybody could see themselves in it. Because we all need to see ourselves in the picture and the circle of human concern. But historically, some people are inside the circle, and some people are outside the circle. In the past LGBTQ folks were outside the circle. Black people have been outside the circle. So the real reason that Momentus [Capital] exists, the reason that the equity movement exists, is because not everybody’s being treated equally. If we were all treated equally, then we wouldn’t need these movements in American society to change access to capital, to change the large disparities you can see in any of these systems.
Some people blame [disparities] on the people themselves. They say “Well, it’s cultural.” Part of what we’re trying to do with this idea of targeted universalism is to flip the script, and we call that equity 2.0.
I’m going to use a metaphor to explain that. Say we’re all in a shopping mall together, and we’re trying to get to an opportunity on the third floor. Well, some people are already on the third floor, and some of us who are on the first floor are trying to get there. We can use different mechanisms to get there. You can use an escalator, you can use the stairs. Those are strategies to get to the goal of getting to the third floor.
But if you’re in a wheelchair, you’re differently situated to get to the opportunity on the third floor. You need a different conveyance, which is an elevator. Now, you don’t hear anybody screaming let’s not build elevators, or being upset that we’re building elevators, in part because we all use elevators regardless of our ability. And so the question is not so much one of race or ethnicity. It is how do we get everybody to the third floor depending on how they’re situated relative to opportunity?
Targeted universalism says we’re not going to harm the folks who are already on the third floor. We’re not going to take anything away from those folks on the third floor, which is the big argument against affirmative action, et cetera. But we need to create different strategies for different people depending on how they’re connected to the opportunities that they see. So then we can do an analysis, and we say, okay, this group of people — and we know there are group differences — needs these types of targeted [strategies]. So the universal [approach]is developing strategies for each group to get to the third floor, very similar to the elevator.
This changes the game. It means that no matter who you are in this country, your connection to opportunity actually gets evaluated. And those structures that are in the way are then addressed as part of a targeted approach. Nobody has to do without. In fact, under targeted universalism, we want those people already on the third floor to do great. We want them to do even better.
If you looked at education as an example and you said, well, the white kids are doing better than the black kids and the Latino kids, we don’t want those white kids to do worse so we all go down to a mediocre level. We want everybody to do well on a targeted universalist framework, and that means that they get whatever opportunities move them up the ladder as well. This targeted universalism is a way for us to rethink the zero-sum strategy that has kept us stuck in America and really think about how we all [move forward] together.
Now, COVID-19 is a clear example of this, It was a great equalizer in some ways because it didn’t matter who you were. If you were in a room with other people with COVID, you would probably get COVID — it didn’t matter what color your skin was. Now, because of how the medical system was structured —and I used to run a medical center — people who didn’t have access to healthcare had worse outcomes than folks who did. Well, who were those folks? They were Native Americans, Latinos, and African Americans. This sounds like a familiar story. But instead of looking at how we break down those barriers, we get into arguments. [People say]“Well, Blacks aren’t taking care of themselves.” Now, this is an aside, but I have never met a black mother who didn’t want welfare for her child.
I’ve never met a Native American grandmother who didn’t want her grandkids to do well.
This idea that there’s something different about these people, and it’s cultural, is part of an argument that is based on racist philosophy about how society works. We need to get away from [the idea that] it’s the person who’s in the situation’s fault. If you’re in a situation where you don’t have access [to opportunity] and everybody in your community doesn’t have access, the outcomes that you will have will be worse. This happens around the world. It’s not new. Targeted universalism is a way for us to think about this so that everybody is included. It gets us out of these zero-sum arguments about race because we start thinking about how to help this group get to the next level.
Now, some advocates have an issue with [this approach] because they say, “Well, they’ve got to pay for what they did to us.” I’m not into denying the history of what has happened, but if I can have the opportunity to change the conditions on the ground for people of color in this country, for LGBTQ people, for people with disabilities, then that’s the path I’m going to take. We need to build a multi-racial movement of people who are really putting people first, rather than the corporations and elite that are controlling the conditions in this country.
So many nuggets there, Gary, thank you for that. So two things: can I bring you back to [the idea of] people first, and getting more people to the third floor? And you mentioned CDFIs and the economic development movement: what is your perspective on the role Momentus [Capital] has in addressing the issues that you just outlined?
Not everything’s a panacea, and there is this idea of cumulative causation, meaning that where people find themselves is not [because of] one thing. There are multiple factors operating at the same time. However, this issue of access to capital and access to resources is critical. I told you I worked in Indian country for a long time, and I worked on a case called the Cobell case, which was the largest settlement in the country’s history for Native American people for some of the injustice that has happened, and billions of dollars went into the native community. But it went right out of the community because there weren’t structures in place for capital accumulation and capital access.
If you’re on a reservation, all of the actual economic bases are in the border towns, and so many of those resources went to the border towns — for food, banking, and access to capital, you name it. That’s where the resources come from. In order for us to transform a community, we need to create economic structures within the community itself so that money just doesn’t leave. Having a beauty shop, a barbershop, a gas station, all of those things matter. And so does having structures where people are actually working, meaning that they are participating in the creation of products and services within those communities.
When I was a community organizer in Detroit, there were certain communities that had much more than other communities, and that’s because of how the system was structured, but they blamed the people in those places. I’m getting back to my theme, but it really is about how structures operate.
The work that [Momentus Capital] is doing in Detroit, the work that we’re doing in Las Vegas, the work we’re doing in Phoenix, the work we’re doing in San Diego, the work we’re doing all over this country, your work is making a difference by creating more of those structures, more entrepreneurs, more developers, more people who are creating jobs and economic opportunity. That’s your work. I know you all have struggles. You go through your day-to-day stuff, and you have kids and all the rest, but at the end of the day, you’re spending a lot of your time here at work, and you’re doing it because you have a belief that you can make a difference.
How many of you are here because you can make a difference? [Applause]
How many of you are here because you’re going to make a difference? [Applause]
How many of you are here because you want to make a difference? [Applause]
Can you make a difference? I’m telling you [you can]. That’s why I’m here. And I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. We’re all humans. We’re imperfect creatures trying to create perfection. We’re going to have conflict with each other. Some of us are going to make mistakes.
My [hope] for each of you in this new world that you’re in as Momentus Capital is [that you will] give each other the benefit of the doubt. When something happens in the workplace, go over to talk to Susie, or Marty, or Bill, or Kwame. Go over and talk to them and say, “Hey, this is how I experienced what you did,” rather than [internalizing] that and creating poison in yourself and others with that dynamic.
I’m not preaching, but what I’ve found in the workplace is that [great things happen] when you build that esprit de corps where everybody feels great about coming to the work and everybody feels like we’re in this together. We’re going for the moonshot here.
This is big. “Momentous” means big, and [Momentus Capital] is big. You can be part of something that makes a difference for a hundred years for your community and for all the communities in this country.
Gary, you are preaching. I just want to let you know that. And we are listening intently. You talked about Momentus [Capital], and you talked about the work, broadly speaking, that we’re engaged in. You’ve seen the community and economic development players across the country through Prosperity Now, your work in Minnesota, etcetera. What do you think is different about [Momentus Capital]? What is it that you think is unique about this organization that you’ve come across?
Well, this is the first time that anything has happened at this scale in the community development field. This is actually a first in the history of community development in this country. Momentus [Capital] is the first [organization] to grow [large-scale] access to capital for communities that have been left out in the country. So this thing that you’re doing is a big idea.
There are all kinds of organizations doing 504 [lending], there are all kinds of organizations doing this work, but it hasn’t been put together in this kind of combination ever before in this country. You are doing something that has never been done. That also means there will be growing pains that go along with that. In doing something that hasn’t been done before, you’re part of a great adventure [that aims] to actually transform how communities work.
I helped found the African American Alliance of CDFIs and the Native American CDFI network, and I was involved in the National Association for Latino Asset Building (NALAB) when it started.
All of those organizations are doing great things, but never before have we been able to be on the ground doing what [Momentus Capital] is doing in so many places. And we’re just at the beginning of this journey. I’m so glad all of you, I mean this sincerely, are here at the beginning of this journey that we’re on together. This is important work. It has the ability to scale.
I have had a lot of jobs, so please forgive me, but at one time, really early in my career, I was a research and development technician for Pillsbury. I was involved with the research team that developed the revolutionary Kris Crust, pizza. Remember that bread? It came in a can with slits on iI was responsible for that slits in the fridge loaf. And I learned from that experience how to scale things. Pillsbury would take something out of a research lab and test it. I worked in a pilot plant, and we’d do all this work, and it would take a year or two, and then we’d bring it to the big plant, and run it on the big machines. Pillsbury had 27 plants around the country, so they could take one product and make it a multimillion-dollar product overnight. They had the packaging, they had everything set up to do that. They knew how to scale.
Most nonprofits develop good ideas, but they stay small because they don’t have a mechanism to scale. They don’t have the wherewithal. What Momementus Capital is building is the ability to scale this work [to build access to capital] in every community — rural communities, urban communities, Native communities. If we had access to capital in all of those communities, we would transform how market capitalism operates in this society because capital wouldn’t be the issue.
If you’re in a capitalist society and you don’t have capital, you are in trouble. This is about getting capital to those who don’t have it and then allowing them to fully participate in our society.
I know we don’t have much time left, but I did want to say one other thing. And again, this isn’t preaching. This is just me trying to share what I know with others and what I know to be true. So I want to try to end up here.
As Ellis said, I love poetry. And there’s a poet named David White. He wrote a book some years ago called The Heart Arouses: How to Bring Your Full Self into the Workplace. [It explores the question of,] how do you bring your full self? You’re sitting in a meeting, and you’re afraid to say what you have to say because you don’t want to disrupt anything or you don’t want change. Or you just have some issues with speaking up in meetings. He uses poetry to talk about that feeling.
Have any of you ever had that feeling when you sit in a room and you can’t say what you need to say? That keeps you from bringing your full self, right? You can’t bring your full self into that space. And so then you’re playing out a front or a persona that isn’t really you and you’re not bringing your full value into the workplace. Just a few years ago, [White] wrote another book on work called The Three Marriages and it’s powerful, powerful stuff. And what he talks about is that all of us have three marriages in our lives.
You don’t have to be married in the classical sense, but you have the one marriage where you actually are with your partner, and that’s the person you love. And you make public pronouncements about being in that relationship. Some have formal marriages, and others do it in other ways, but we all have relationships because we are human. Everybody doesn’t have a relationship right now, but we all long for those relationships.
The second marriage that he talks about is your marriage to your work. Many of you haven’t thought about work as a marriage. You haven’t thought “I’m married to my work.” But in many ways, you’re doing very similar things. You’re making a pronouncement to everybody — here’s who I am in my work life. And your work life takes up a lot of your time, energy, and effort. How many of you have left work and been exhausted? If you haven’t, you will.
Part of that is because you’re putting so much emotional energy into work. It’s emotional labor, it’s emotional attention, it’s intellectual attention. It’s your body as well. All of that is involved in your work, and you’re making a commitment to something. [You’re] signing on to be part of something in [your] workplace. That’s the second marriage.
The third marriage is to yourself. What are the commitments that you’re making to yourself about what you’re going to do and how you’re going to be? Who do you want to be? How do you want to be perceived? And how do you want to operate within this gift that we have? It’s a gift that we’re all sitting here together. Nobody knows what this is. We’re floating on this ball going through space, right? Nobody has an answer, but you’re here for something, right? And you’re here for something greater than just taking care of your own needs.
Just think for a moment. Imagine you were in a room and you had the door closed and all your needs were being met in this room — you had all the food you wanted, you had the music you liked. Does that sound good? I would argue that after a while, you would get bored in that room because there’s no chance for growth. The growth is in the struggle. The growth is in those things that are complicated, the things that are hard.
And so when you’re having issues with yourself, with your own challenges or with others — and most of the times [you think] it’s with others, the reality is that most of what’s in your head — how do you want to be? That’s the last marriage.
And finally, I just want to thank you all for having me today.
Gary, you have been a blessing to me. You’re a blessing to [Momentus Capital], and I’m really so happy that you and the rest of the Board of Directors have our back. Thank you for coming in and sharing your wisdom with us today.