Into the Record: Moving Beyond the Biases In Global Capital: Demonstrating What's Possible
Podcast Episode 5 with guest, Dr. Gillian Marcelle
Episode Description
Dr. Gillian Marcelle, CEO of Resilience Capital Ventures LLC (RCV), is the creator of the “Triple-B Framework'' a strategy for mobilizing and deploying financial and non-financial forms of capital towards achieving societal well-being, economic flourishing, and planetary stewardship goals.
She discusses her approach to reimagining finance and investment, and her career spanning academia, economic development, and investment banking, explaining how she connects the dots between high finance and social justice. This is personal story of commitment to justice, that starts from her activist roots in Trinidad and Tobago, then takes us through to education and training in the US and Europe, professional experience in London, and global advocacy while based in South Africa, culminating now in providing leadership in the world of global finance.
Learn her take on what is needed to change systems today.
If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Marcelle, visit Resilience Capital Ventures LLC (RCV).
To learn more about Make Justice Normal, visit us at makejusticenormal.org. Follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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The main Into the Record RSS can be found here.
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Ben Okri Poem: Earth Cries
Episode Recap
Interview in written form, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE, GUEST:
The way that we are going to succeed in these changes that we are making to financial and other systems is through changing narratives, building movements, and then ensuring that the change agents have the tools and the practices that would enable them to be effective.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
MONIQUE AIKEN, HOST:
What would the world be like if justice were normal? What if our systems defaulted to anti-bias and pro-earth policies, programs, and practices? I am Monique Aiken, your guide for Into The Record, a podcast from the Make Justice Normal collective, on a mission to foster just relationships and collective action among people working to make justice normal. In each episode, we'll hear from change-makers who interrogate history and the status quo. They're forging a new imagination of what's possible as we create new systems where justice is the default, and injustice the stuff of history books.
Our guest today is Dr. Gillian Marcelle, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Resilience Capital Ventures.
(THEME MUSIC OUT)
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
My call to justice is very personal because at the tender age of 21, I was struck by personal tragedy and trauma when my eldest brother, who had converted to Islam, was killed in police custody. I remember my brother, who was a strong advocate for anti-Apartheid, standing at the back of an auditorium for an event that I had organized, challenging Caribbean people to be ‘less about the talk and more about the walk’., "What are you doing here sitting in St. Augustine, Trinidad talking about the struggle in South Africa? Why aren't you there?" That was September 1984. A decade later, South Africa had achieved democracy.
Growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, I was surrounded by freedom fighters and revolutionaries, particularly because in my childhood there was an important black power revolution in 1970. My father was fiercely nationalistic, very proud. He often waged one-man protests against racism and classism. My mother, I think is my living example of what feminist values look like in a day-to-day manner because she was always involved in women's well-being.
As such, growing up in my household, it was quite normal to express oneself in terms of interests in social justice and academic excellence. Those early years set me up to be very active in student politics. The Caribbean in the 1980s was a heady time for politics, having in a sense solved the anti-Black racism in the 70s, the decade before, political interest moved on to Pan-Africanism and Anti-Colonialism. This was a time greatly influenced by the radical revolutionary movement in Grenada.
In my case, I extended this revolutionary fervor into a focus on women's rights as I had become very interested in gender equality and went on to found the very first formal expression of women's rights, as part of the student movement, at my university, the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
My involvement in feminism continued as a student in Washington DC, and then in South Africa, where I was heavily involved in founding two women's organizations that responded to the rapidly changing technological era that, at the time, we called the Information Society. I've been very privileged to continue to do work with feminists, in particular young feminists in South Africa for more than two decades. In a recent workshop, remember saying to the group that “I take my feminism wherever I go”, encouraging them to see tackling inequality and inequity as part of one’s feminism.
Connecting the Dots: Social Justice to High Finance
My purpose has for a very long time been to be a bridge.
Education and training provide a strong foundation for everything that I do. I have earned multiple degrees in economics, business administration and international economics and a PhD in Science and Technology Policy. This made me well equipped to work in mergers and acquisitions, industry research and regulation specializing in telecoms and the information technology industries. My foundation gave me the confidence to work in equity capital markets for global institutions, like JP Morgan and in development finance at the International Finance Corporation.
Right now, as the leader of a capital advisory practice, Resilience Capital Ventures (RCV), headquartered in Washington DC, I bridge more than thirty years of experience gained on four continents with the cultural and philosophical foundation that I have from Caribbean civilization.
RCV’s flagship conceptual framework the “Triple B Framework” sets out a strategy for combining financial capital with other forms of capital to deliver packages, products, and services, to make the world a better place and to bring all forms of capital to underserved regions.
Our clients and partners at Resilience Capital Ventures include large mission-focused think tanks like PolicyLink, and foundations like the Clinton Foundation and Open Society Foundations. We've worked with private equity funds - MPC Caribbean Clean Energy Fund, and with special purpose vehicles such as MPC Energy Solutions. We now have a mandate to design and execute a multi-year program that meets the sustainable development objectives of the Government of The Bahamas
I often have to connect the dots and draw the lines, connecting the threads between my commitment to social justice and operating within high finance. To be effective in high finance, RCV uses our financial chops, more than 100 years of combined experience, including my background and those of my senior finance colleagues in risk structures, green bonds, and climate bonds. We use this to design and offer solutions to parts of the world that would not ordinarily be considered because of cognitive bottlenecks, what the “Triple B Framework” refers to as blind spots.
RCV is proudly now five years old. In those five years, the firm has demonstrated the financial expertise to move beyond the biases and blind spots that permeate global capital. We also understand that there are structural bottlenecks that prevent women from getting to decision-making levels within finance.
So, when we show up as a team that is led by a Black woman, that is a demonstration of what is possible. I take my academic and political interest in feminism, which has been as important an influence as any other, into the doing.
I think that my walk towards justice, what Madiba called a “long walk”, away from inequity and unfairness, is one that I don't do alone. I am accompanied by my late brother and his fierce commitment to challenging injustice wherever he saw it.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
In recent years, you've become a recognized voice on LinkedIn and also a contributor to published works such as the book, The Business of Building a Better World, to your very point of living that purpose. The chapter that you contributed to was entitled Transforming Business, Transforming Value, and you've advised investors, multilateral institutions and governments like you just shared. So, can you tell us more about the ways that you use your voice specifically to advance the impact economy and why you do so intentionally and the purpose of that tool?
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
I believe that the way that we are going to succeed in these changes that we are making to financial and other systems is through changing narratives, building movements, and then ensuring that the change agents have the tools and the practices that would enable them to be effective. So, the work on LinkedIn, the work in speaking and writing, in contributing to books, as well as writing articles and blogs is part of that narrative change work.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
How can we leverage this to deliver needed social environmental change for the world? As in how can the rest of us understand how to do this like you?
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
You see me on LinkedIn challenging, showing up to challenge injustice very frontally and without pretense.
In the last few months, I've also been making the point that dismay is not a luxury that many in the world can afford. We all need to leverage hope. I am inspired by many of our leaders, including the late Reverend Desmond Tutu, who spoke about hope as a discipline and being a prisoner of hope.
As such, I engage actively and with great energy showing up and explaining how to do systems change
My mother says that that is part of what marks me because apparently, I didn't wait to be born. I didn't wait for the midwife and my grandmother to help her. I just decided that I was ready.
In my own personal practice, I make a point of drawing on the things that inspire, like music, poetry, art, to stay the course.
I am also very honest about the setbacks and disappointments that are part of life. When we come out fighting, which we must do because systems change is a contact sport for grownups; there will be betrayals, there will be sabotage, there will be resistance, there will be backlash. But if we are engaged in this work as a collective and we are drawing on all of our resources, including art and culture, I think that we will triumph.
In preparing for this conversation, I came across a relatively new poem by Ben Okri, titled Earth Cries from which I'd like to share an extract.
"How do you get the heirs of the world to listen without fear and to listen with courage? We need a new language that howls and caresses at the same time, a new language that frightens and gives hope simultaneously, that tells the truth and transcends the truth in the same breath. For the human being is a frail vessel that cannot take the light and yet cannot face the darkness."
I found that poem to be tremendously inspiring. And of course, it echoes so much with our work on illuminating blind spots and shining a light into the areas of this work that often are scary.
In doing the work of taking on racialized capitalism, in designing solutions that work, in putting forward new ideas, and in supporting others who are engaged in this work, we suggest that the way forward for hopeful action can include efforts to widen the solution space. This means drawing on bodies of knowledge and different types of practices, particularly by extending beyond modern Western capitalism to draw on alternative ways of knowing, of being, of seeing, and of understanding the world that have so much to offer.
We must be ready to confront crises coming out of COVID with the sense of the intensity that is required, but as part of our practice we must also rest and lean into joy. We must work to enroll and deploy solidarity and have ways of working with our teams, with our countries, in our families, and with the wider community, that as Anne Price reminds us, allows us to invoke joy.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
You mentioned our shared friend Anne Price, a woman who I deeply admire and her work naming and including joy specifically into the effort. So where's the path to joyfulness despite the seriousness of the work ahead?
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
Simple things like going to movies, being able to chill out, disconnect from the troubles and tribulations, and making time to dance. It is so important to have celebratory rituals, moments of relaxation especially in Nature, and opportunities for release. I think these are very important to bring into our ways of being, in daily life and in community.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
To just go in a slightly different direction, what is the most important value to center in this collective work that you've described? And how do we consider the effect of our work today on the lives of those coming seven generations from now? Because what will remain is that kernel of what we have input in terms of the value, the enduring principle.
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
I would say perseverance and detachment from outcomes even though that may sound a bit dark and foreboding.
A very good friend and I often speak about the fact that many of the people who've made the most profound contributions to social justice did not live to see their fortieth birthdays. We were recently looking at the foreword to one of Walter Rodney's books that has been redone.
In it his daughter wrote,
"Some people are good at writing, some people are good at teaching, some people are good at inspiring others in movements, but there are few people who are good at all of them."
She was remarking to her late father who's no longer here, that he was good at all of those things. This remarkable icon was killed at thirty-eight. Even though not all of us are one-in-a-generation influences like Walter Rodney, what I gain from considering that kind of effort, sacrifice, determination, and perseverance, is that even if we mobilize a fraction of those elements in our own walk, we will make more valuable contributions.
I also think that intellectual curiosity, being interested in the ways in which things work and in how they operate, is another important consideration for making a difference and changing the world.
MONIQUE AIKEN:
You also mentioned in your collective action comments earlier that we need to work together and in solidarity, but where have you found unlikely allies in that work? Because I think we need all of us, we need mobilization, we need a force, we need an army. So where have you found unexpected, shared beliefs and synchronicity in this work?
DR. GILLIAN MARCELLE:
Well, right now it's not so unexpected anymore; but in 2021, I did a lot of work with Jed Emerson. He and I come from very different cultural communities and backgrounds. We co-authored that chapter that you mentioned, “Transforming Business, Transforming Value”.
Another way that we build a collective consciousness through our work at RCV, and my own work is by being intergenerational. I work with many younger people and have my own personal advisory team of mainly feminists who are older than I am. They include my dear friend, Bunie Matlanyane Sexwale, Julie Oyegun, and my PhD supervisor, Professor Robin Mansell. In terms of important influences I would go as far back to the mid-1980s when I interned at the National Research Council with MacArthur Awardee, Professor Heidi Hartmann. Those women are strong influences in what I do and how I show up and are a source of inspiration and advice.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interact with Caribbean feminists such as Professor Eudine Barriteau from Barbados and Dr. Asha Kambon in Trinidad and Tobago. These women are a reminder of the deep pools from which we can draw.
Systems change is work that will involve many different actors, whether they are academics, advocates, community leaders, philanthropists, or advisors. However, there are very few spaces for collective action aimed at what Ben Okri asks us to do, to both consider the light and the darkness.
Social media tends to either be very negative or cheerleadingly positive. So, it's not the best space for critical engagement. But solidarity-building venues and spaces are very much needed because that is how we will improve the work, both on a global basis and within individual countries.
As an example, in August 2023, in the United States, there was a lawsuit against a Black female-led venture capital company aimed at stopping them from giving grants to Black women. My thought is that if clear-thinking, justice-oriented individuals, including myself, had done a better job of creating venues, platforms, and methods of operating in solidarity, then we would be able to mount a resistance to that lawsuit and deliver an unintended consequence, a blow to the forces of darkness that are behind that effort.
Finding ways to build and grow with collective energy is an important part of this work and much more remains to be done. I believe we can learn from successes such as the global anti apartheid movement that galvanized resources and united justice-oriented people all around the world. To be effective in response to the polycrisis and the climate emergency, to defeat institutional racism we must operate at this scale and on those terms once again. To change harmful systems and disrupt entrenched power will require us to mobilize the energies and the talents of people all around the world.
(THEME MUSIC IN)
MONIQUE AIKEN:
That was Dr. Gillian Marcelle. My IQ literally shoots up with each conversation I have with her. I'm grateful to her for her friendship and her longtime support of Make Justice Normal, even before we had a name for the organization. And for those who don't know, Gillian was the inspiration for the name of this very podcast. And to our listeners, we're grateful for your time. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Marcelle, you can visit resiliencecapitalventures.com.
Into the Record is produced by Make Justice Normal in partnership with Pod People. We’d like to thank everyone in the MJN core team - Anjali Deshmukh, Cari Hanson, Erika Seth Davies, and Charney Robinson-Wiliams.
A special thanks to Kristen Engberg and the Racial Equity Asset Lab for their generous support.
And at Pod People Alex Vikmanis, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Ashton Carter, Shai Wottitz, Kinsey Clarke, and Morgane Fouse.
I’m Monique Aiken, cofounder of Make Justice Normal, cofounder of the ReStarter Fund, Contributing Editor at ImpactAlpha and Managing Director at TIIP, The Investment Integration Project.
To learn more about Make Justice Normal, visit us at makejusticenormal.org or subscribe to our substack at the same name. Follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram at @ MJNnow.
The MJN collective has additional programs and products that we are resourcing. We welcome ideas for aligned philanthropic donors and/or sponsors. Reach out to learn more about the research we’re leading, tools we’re testing and models we’re prototyping. Send ideas or feedback to me at monique@makejusticenormal.org
Thanks for listening and helping us write justice into the record.
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Copyright © 2023 Pod People. All rights reserved.
This essay is a complement to the audio podcast, it was developed by RCV as part of the wraparound experience for the audio product using a Pod People transcript as an input. That material was edited for clarity and flow. Dr. Gillian Marcelle as lead author and edited by Danielle Mayers.
This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of Pod People’s programming is the audio record.
References
Dr. Gillian Marcelle: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillianmarcelle
Resilience Capital Ventures: https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/
Triple B Framework: https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/triplebframeworkpositionpaper
PolicyLink, Investor Blueprint: https://www.policylink.org/node/69846
Clinton Global Initiative 2023: https://www.clintonfoundation.org/clinton-global-initiative-september-2023-meeting/
Open Society Foundations, Climate Justice: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/what-we-do/themes/climate-justice
MPC Clean Energy Fund: https://www.mpc-cleanenergy.com/
MPC Energy Solutions: https://www.mpc-energysolutions.com/
Bahamas Sustainable Investment Program: https://www.resiliencecapitalventures.com/the-bahamas-sustainable-investment-program-bsip
Reverend Desmund Tutu: His Life and Work https://www.lookingforwisdom.com/ubuntu/ Reverand Tutu’s collaborative leadership work: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/desmond-tutu-jimmy-carter_b_476610
Ben Okri. 2023. Earth Cries: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/05/earth-cries-ben-okri
Anne Price. 2020. Centering Blackness: The Path to Economic Liberation for All. Medium. https://insightcced.medium.com/centering-blackness-the-path-to-economic-liberation-for-all-f6c2c7398281
Walter Rodney. 1972. Republished 2018. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Publishing. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/788-how-europe-underdeveloped-africa
Jed Emerson, author of “The Purpose of Capital”. https://www.blendedvalue.org/the-purpose-of-capital
Marcelle, G. and Emerson, J. (2021) Transforming Business Transforming Value, Chapter 11 in Cooperrider & Selian. The Business of Building a Better World. Berrett- Koehler Publishers. https://www.bkconnection.com/books/title/The-Business-of-Building-a-Better-World
Bunie Matlanyane Sexwale: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bunie-m-matlanyane-sexwale-49b76821/?originalSubdomain=za
Julie Oyegun: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-oyegun-a0648a6/
Professor Robin Mansell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robin-mansell-339b2212/
National Research Council. 1987. Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women’s Empowerment, Vol II. Case Studies and Policy Perspectives. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/951/computer-chips-and-paper-clips-technology-and-womens-employment-volume
Professor Heidi Hartmann: https://iwpr.org/author/heidi/
Professor Eudine Barriteau: https://caricom.org/personalities/professor-violet-eudine-barriteau/
Dr. Asha Kambon: https://www.emancipationtt.com/team/board-members/#:~:text=She%20holds%20a%20Doctorate%20in,greater%20control%20of%20their%20lives.