Inside and Outside the System That’s Cracking
Reflections on TIIP’s 4th Conference: Where the Center Meets the Edge
It’s a strange thing to attend a conference on long-term financial stewardship while the global financial system is actively coming apart by design.
Outside the room: volatility, capital flight, stalled investment, and the fallout from the so-called Liberation Day tariffs. Central banks are preparing to respond. Fund managers are disoriented. Public spending on science and international development is collapsing. What’s being shaken isn’t just market confidence. It’s the architecture itself.
Inside the room: calm, deliberate conversation. No spin. No panic. The fourth annual gathering of The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), organized by William Burckart and Monique Aiken. My first time there. A room full of institutional weight: CalPERS, Nippon Life, Surdna Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Stewards of billions.
But they weren’t defending business as usual. The conversation got to the core:
What does fiduciary duty mean: now, in this context?
There was no retreat into legalese. As Tiffany Reeves, Partner at Faegre Drinker, made clear: fiduciary duty is not a fossil. There are “no universally accepted or enduring theories of financial markets” that can provide clear and specific guidance to trustees and courts. Prudence isn’t fixed. It’s a process. It’s forward-looking. It’s diligence. It’s research and learning. It’s in motion. It has to evolve for the beneficiaries (in the case of a pension fund) or the mission (in the case of a foundation) as external conditions change.
To act as a fiduciary now is to consider not just financial returns within the portfolio, but the health of the systems those portfolio investments rely on.
I still respect the institutional approach, and efforts like TIIP. The ambition to change it from the inside out.
When I first entered finance, the institutional side, the “buy side” of pensions and foundation portfolios, felt like a different religion. The buy-side analysts wore bow ties. The sell-side analysts just wore ties.
The institutional folks were steady, measured, circumspect. The sell side had bigger expense accounts. Selling IPOs and debt deals fueled by speculative narratives of growth. We fed the machine with stories, hoping to hook the capital on the rise.
I understand the call to “go big or go home.” When you start to change the financial system from the leverage point of the Chief Investment Officer of a billion-dollar fund, and those folks start to collaborate, you are moving percentages of billions. You begin at scale.
But I don’t believe that’s the only way forward.
Because something else was happening.
In the breaks and side conversations, I found myself talking with collaborators from FEST, TWIST, and the Inclusive Capital Collective. The frame of the conference shifted. My own stance shifted. The room felt warmer. Literally and metaphorically. I received hugs.
This is the edge of finance.
Not the fringe. Not a sandbox for innovation. The edge is where new systems are being built, because the old ones can no longer hold.
At the edge, finance is not outsourced or wrapped in proprietary models.
It’s built by communities, cooperatives, and mutuals.
Trust isn’t marketing. It’s infrastructure.
Returns are measured in resilience, repair, reallocation, and yes… reparations.
FEST (Financial Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation) operates as a collaborative community of practitioners and researchers committed to systems change and transformation. Our initiative focuses on organizing financing systems at the level of the ecosystem stewards, rather than isolated funds or projects, not centering the perspective of the capital allocator. FEST’s vision is a world where financing is provided in the quantity and with the ease necessary to address the need for systems transformation.1
TransCap is an innovation space for developing, demonstrating, and scaling systemic investing. TransCap’s vision is to change the way sustainable finance is purposed, programmed, deployed, and managed so that money can become a transformative force in building a low-carbon, climate-resilient, just, and inclusive society.2
TWIST is a global collective of investors, practitioners, researchers, and facilitators mobilizing capital, evidence, community, and mindset shifts. TWIST envisions a world in which all forms of capital are consciously and effectively activated in service of systems transformation, so that Mother Earth and all living beings can thrive.3
ICC (Inclusive Capital Collective) is building collective financial infrastructure rooted in Black, Indigenous, and working-class wisdom, long excluded from capital design. Its purpose is to overcome systemic racism through equitable access to capital, and achieves this by aiding and amplifying capital innovators and service providers who are building wealth in their communities using debt, equity and real estate instruments, and by connecting them in a jointly owned and governed network.4
These collectives and initiatives are not waiting to be recognized by the center.
But they’re not disconnected from it either.
They are crafting viable, situated alternatives. Ones that risk being dismissed as “too small,” too unscalable. But scale isn’t the measure that matters. The vector of change is. Because sometimes, that edge work finds its way into the mainline of institutional finance.
Take the example shared at the event by Don Chen, President of the Surdna Foundation, an investment in a community-owned financing structure designed to reinhabit underused strip malls and transform them into community hubs. It’s a bet on place, on collective agency, and the upside of expanding investment opportunities to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In that moment, I spotted Najaah Daniels from ICC in the room.
I found myself wondering if the folks from the Surdna Foundation, who had been early funders of field-building and grantmaking in this space, were talking about Lynier Richardson, one of the original members of ICC’s Black Real Estate Collective. His work, and the work of others in the collective, has been focused on designing capital stacks that unlock community ownership in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, and Oakland.
This isn’t just real estate development. It’s a direct confrontation with the structural legacy of redlining and racialized disinvestment. It’s about rewriting the architecture of ownership. Creating new financial vehicles, community-controlled trusts, and models of stewardship that make space for collective agency.
They were: “Chicago’s abundant small shopping centers are an overlooked asset to build community wealth.”5
The grantmaking side of the foundation connects to the investing side.
That’s what makes TIIP’s convenings, and others like TransCap’s recent gathering in London, so significant. Conversations are happening in institutional spaces that were unthinkable a decade ago. Capital allocators are beginning to wrestle with their own power, assumptions, and constraints. Occasionally, the experiments, prototypes, and collective work at the edge make their way into an institution’s portfolio.
Not everyone has all of the answers. But increasingly, better questions are being asked. So here are mine:
Can the center and the edge co-evolve, not as a compromise but as a constellation?
Can institutional stewards of long-term capital walk a bit quicker towards the edge?
To the communities experiencing the first and worst of the overlapping crisis maps shared by David Erickson of the NY Fed in their “Missing Markets”6 work?
This moment doesn’t need better metrics.
It needs a new relationship to capital.
The learning collectives: FEST, TWIST, ICC, and Transcap do not share a single framework. They sometimes use the same words to mean different things. But what they share is a shift in stance.
From finance as extraction and control,
to finance as stewardship, transition, and contribution.
They understand that how capital flows, who controls it, and what it’s accountable to will shape whether that future is livable or violent.
If you’re working on change and haven’t examined the financial systems beneath your work, now is the time.
You don’t have to be a financial expert.
But you do have to stop treating finance as something for people in tall buildings to own, on their own.
The old system isn’t coming back. What comes next will be shaped by those bold enough to imagine, build, and practice finance differently. Together.
- https://www.festfield.finance/
- https://transformation.capital/
- https://www.wearetwist.org/
- https://www.inclusive-capital.us/
- https://www.chicagobusiness.com/equity/turn-strip-malls-drivers-community-change-opinion
- https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/outreach-and-education/household-financial-well-being/reports/2024/making-missing-markets