Gino Borges:

Thank you all for joining us today on The Journey to Impact: A Virtual Fireside Chat Series. The Journey to Impact Series is here to tell a different story of impact. While we naturally address some of the landmarks of the journey, this series is designed to create space for uncovering the emotional, mental, spiritual challenges, and successes along the path of impact. It is less about the outcomes or results of our actions, but rather the human components of what it feels like to operate in the impact world, illumining one’s inner journey. Today, I’d like to welcome Kristin Hull. Kristin founded Nia Community Investments in 2010, a 100% mission-aligned investment fund focused on social justice and environmental sustainability. She launched Nia Global Solutions in 2013 to bring activism and impact investing into public markets weaving a gender-lens throughout. Prior to Nia, Kristin served as President and Chair of the Whole Family Foundation, transitioning the endowment from a traditional investment portfolio to one of the country’s first 100% mission-impacted investing portfolios. She is also Co-founder of ImpactHub Oakland, and prior to dedicating her career to conscious investing, Kristin served as an educator and classroom teacher. I feel really fortunate to be able to share this story with our community and to be able to have this conversation with you. Why don’t we begin with where your transition happened from education to conscious investing. Was it even conscious investing at the beginning?

Kristin Hull:

I actually started my career in finance in a way. My dad started a trading firm in our garage as one does in California. I had been talking puts and calls, pork bellies, since I was 14. Dinner table conversations were about futures and commodities and what it meant for farmers to be able to sell their crop ahead of time. But mostly, it was about high frequency trading and the mantra was always to buy low, sell high as often as one possibly could in a day. That’s how I grew up. I knew very well modern portfolio theory. Of course, in the 80s, it wasn’t very modern. Now we’re talking postmodern, but I’ve always known the benefits of diversification and some of the theories behind our financial world.

That being said, it felt unwieldy, a beast. I’ve always wanted to make the most impact possible. For me, becoming a classroom teacher right out of college was the right move. I loved being in the classroom. I loved sharing, facilitating, learning, and seeing that “aha” moment every single day for my fourth graders or kindergartners. That really brought me to life. It wasn’t until 2007 when I stepped back in. Our worlds then collided. I had been on the investment committee and had served different roles in the family company, but it wasn’t until we sold it and started a family foundation where I stepped back into finance and saw that I actually had a role to play in changing that world.

Gino Borges:

What did that world look like to you at that time when you stepped into the family foundation? What was the beforehand, and what did you have to go through in order for it to look like what it does today?

Kristin Hull:

We had it pretty easy in my particular situation because we had sold the company to Goldman Sachs. We were already rooted in the need for diversification. When you sell a company to Goldman Sachs, you get mostly Goldman stock. We were all under both orders and agreement that we wanted to sell that as often as we could. Every time we got the opportunity, and it was every 18 months, we could sell a certain tranche. That happened to coincide with my learning about endowments. In 2007, I went to the Global Philanthropy Forum, my very first philanthropy gathering. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know anything about philanthropy. The closest I had been was selling or buying Girl Scout cookies.

I had been on the front lines in my career as a teacher. I knew a lot about grant writing because I was always seeking more funds for my urban classrooms to take kids on field trips, to get books for our classroom, and to build a library in schools that didn’t have them. I had been on the grant writing side, but I didn’t know anything about the funding side, and definitely not about foundations. That was actually the perfect place to start. I didn’t have generations of elders telling me how it should be done or could be done or how it needed to be done. There wasn’t anyone in my family that had any legacy economy ways of thinking about this. It was really convenient when I went to this conference and found it was some of the really big players—Ford and maybe two others onstage discussing politely—but really arguing about whether you could get to 2% of your endowment towards your mission in PRIs.

I was in the back of the room, raising my hand, saying 2%? If you could do 2%, could it be a hundred? No one called on me and it didn’t matter. I really got what I needed at that point, and I actually left the conference right then. I realized, “I’m on a mission.” I got on the phone saying, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do!” We’re going to take the endowment and we’re going to actually use it as a tool for our philanthropic mission, which at that time was social justice and environmental sustainability. Taking every dollar that we had and aligning it with our mission just made sense for me. The light bulb had gone off and of course it was a lovely, lovely year to get into this because pulling everything out of public markets in 2007 was fun; much more fun in 2008 when we had done some fixed income investing, identified seven different community banks, and we’re up 2% when foundations nationwide were down 28%. I would say that was also a key moment for me because it wasn’t that I predicted the markets in any way, but I did get a lot of validation to keep going and to keep on this path.

Gino Borges:

Where did the inspiration come from to strive for the 100% model versus the 2% of traditional foundations?

Kristin Hull:

We were actually the very first foundation to be 100% in the US. There weren’t any peers. There was no one to look for, but I think it was pretty key that I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t have any peers. I didn’t have to check in with someone. They would have told me I was crazy. Again, the big foundations were arguing about whether they could actually do 2%, and they didn’t find that prudent, smart, or even doable. I wasn’t waiting for approval. That was also a good thing. I didn’t have peers to bounce ideas off of. Once we had finally done it, so many people started coming to me asking questions: “What are you doing?” “How did you do that?” That’s when I realized that there wasn’t anybody else that had done this at this point.

Financially, we were so far ahead that it was really interesting that the market had gone the other way. Maybe this wouldn’t have been the biggest story at that time, but we knew we needed liquidity because we were really heavy on the grant side and we weren’t stopping at 5%. Having liquidity was really important at that time. I didn’t want any exposure to the public markets, mainly because I didn’t see anything there that fit my values about the progress that we wanted to make, the social justice that we wanted to make. We really were targeting the things that, at that time, a community bank serves: giving local loans to women and people of color for small businesses by design. They’re not bidding for international projects like pipelines and fossil fuels. They’re actually, by definition, keeping money in local communities and empowering people in a social justice way. Some of the banks we identified did financial literacy classes for unbanked immigrant populations. It just really hit our targets in so many different ways.

Gino Borges:

When you did arrive at 100%, how did you know you were at 100%; meaning, how did you know you were at 100% impact? Besides banks, you were utilizing all private vehicles. What types of vehicles were you in, and how did you go about chasing them down to figure out this whole puzzle?

Kristin Hull:

We were in seven different community banks. I knew exactly where that money was going, so very transparent about where my loans were going, where the money was going. That wasn’t hard to tell at all; that was easy. We were 100% and very proud of that with seven community banks. At that time, we were one of Imprint Capital’s first clients. They helped us identify and vet a lot of these things. My main interests at that time were and continue to be my hometown of Oakland, California, and also Venezuela, where I spent a lot of time and lived as a teenager. I did task them with finding the investments in Oakland and Venezuela, yet that didn’t happen. For many different reasons, I might have outgrown Imprint. I moved on and did Nia Community where I could focus on women and people of color in Oakland. I left the family foundation and then started that body of work with the LLC officially in 2010. I had enough experience in the foundation world that I knew I wanted to do alternative term sheets, and I really wanted to push the edges of social justice in our investing. Having a traditional foundation felt like it might be too constricting to me. I incorporated as an LLC, and as a pass-through, so that I had Nia Community Investments. I also had Nia Community Foundation. This is all pre-Zuckerburg before they did a very similar thing many years later. At the time, I thought all of the proceeds from any revenues generated from these investments would then pass through to the foundation and be granted out. That has since changed. My thinking is that I’m making a lot of impact in these early stage investments on the LLC side. A lot of that is getting recirculated through that vehicle.

Gino Borges:

Nia is separate from the family foundation, is that correct? The family foundation continues to exist today as a 100% impact foundation. Is that correct?

Kristin Hull:

Right. I’m no longer involved in that entity.

Gino Borges:

I noticed that you said you didn’t find anything in the public equities market when you started to move the foundation to a 100% impact. How much of the inspiration for setting up Nia came from it being a potential solution for public equities with an impact lens? Share with us the migration of recognizing the benefits to yourself as an impact investor and thought leader to recognizing the benefits to the masses.

Kristin Hull:

Thank you for recognizing that. It’s a different level of commitment. I did the first 100% foundation. In 2010, that still was the second one in the US to be 100% impact invested. I was on a roll. I was doing this. At that point, people were paying attention and asking me about my investments with full transparency. All of our investments are listed on a very simple, simple website, showing every single thing we’ve ever invested in for full transparency. It’s available. I was being asked to speak and to consult with family foundations, family offices, individual investors. I was sharing my journey and showing them different types of investments. I wasn’t in public equities at all, and I was completely happy and, in fact, proud. I probably had a little chip on my shoulder about that because I was having the impact I wanted to have, getting the returns I needed, and had the liquidity I needed without the public markets. I was good. However, the story wasn’t translating in a way that was moving money. I kept saying “the water is warm, come on in.” For many different reasons, the patriarchy’s alive and well. Also, our capital world is frozen in certain beliefs. We’re very wedded to public markets in this country. A couple things shifted for me. One, I knew that I had already done the work of my own capital and that it was really maximized as far as what I was able to achieve. That needed to leverage more capital. My story needed to be translatable so that it would motivate others.

That meant I had to go back into public markets to make the story more appealing and to have a sample portfolio that others could follow. This is similar to my work with Imprint. Two years I spent researching on my own, and I had them bring me every possible thing, yet there just wasn’t anything that met my criteria at that time. I wanted a portfolio of a 100% solutions-focused companies. I didn’t want to start with an index and then screen out some of the bad players that had been going on for a while known as SRI. The fact that it’s called socially responsible investing is a misnomer. It makes us sleep better because we think we’re being responsible and yet we’re really still uplifting our incumbent economy that has a lot of mediocre players. Both on the risk perspective and on the impact perspective, we’re not being as responsible as I felt we needed to be. I was really looking to take my Nia Community portfolio and bring that type of a venture-style approach into the public markets. At the time, that didn’t exist. No one was doing it the way I wanted it done. I built the portfolio so that it would be available to others so that they could have the types of impact that I was having in my portfolio, but cheap, the best qualities of the public markets. For me, there’s something about public stocks in that it’s the first way that we democratized investing in that everybody can own one stock and have that potential for growth for what our economy’s doing.

To build a well-diversified, beautiful portfolio with public stocks was starting to become appealing to me. It was also a real big challenge, like a chess game, to figure it out. We can’t lose sight of this daily liquidity. A lot of the companies I was working with in the Nia Community didn’t offer daily liquidity. In fact, it had many years locked up. That wasn’t going to be appealing, and it wasn’t going to help new investors get into the game and shift their capital. Meeting people where they were at, but with an impact-designed portfolio, was essential. I also knew that by moving away from the S&P, we were going to access a lot more potential for alpha. Having an active share and investing differently gives investors exposure to all sorts of solutions that have traditionally been overlooked in our indexes.

Gino Borges:

Help me understand what you mean by structuring as venture-style. Also, what does it mean to have solution companies as part of your public equities portfolio?

Kristin Hull:

I started with a very similar process that I’m guessing the UN went through. I wasn’t actually invited to sit at that table. However, we had the Nia Six Solution Themes, which line up with the UN SDGs really well. There are 17 SDGs. We encapsulate it with six, but it’s everything that people and planet need to thrive together sustainably. That’s everything from sustainable infrastructure, sustainable transportation, access and innovation with healthcare, education, communications. We were working on what are the themes that are needed for people and planet. That’s how we begin our investment process, on the research behind what’s available and what are the solutions within our solution themes. That’s how we build the portfolio that way.

Looking at a company for its growth potential, basically indexing, is very male-centric. Size is a male concept, and it doesn’t really appeal to those of us with a feminine side. Choosing companies based on how large they are doesn’t make sense to me. To me, I want to know what is the purpose of the company. What are its revenues? Where does it come from? What are the products and services? Does it have an effective team to get that job done? Those are the things that are interesting to me. Not where the headquarters are. Sometimes the headquarters is interesting. We’ll go anywhere globally to look for that. But, the size of the company isn’t going to be the key factor in our decision. We are “cap-size agnostic.” It does turn out that you can find solutions-focused companies in every cap-size. That’s been really important to not limit our search.

Gino Borges:

Can you give us an example and a non-example of solution-based companies?

Kristin Hull:

Given our six solution themes, water is one of the things that we really care about. We ask who are the publicly traded companies that are helping get people clean water, keep our water clean, or grant access to water; we are looking for people that are solving that issue and the companies behind those people. Solving those issues could then make it into our portfolio. Another criteria in addition to being solutions-focused is that we do require diversity in leadership. That knocks out about 50% of the companies we look at.

Gino Borges:

What does diversity look like to you?

Kristin Hull:

That’s a really good question because on the Nia Community side of things, we invest in women-led and people-of-color-led firms, companies, and startups. Our banking is around those issues. In the publicly traded markets, we don’t always have that level of diversity. We have a very minimum criteria. Then we also do a lot of advocacy about increasing both on the government policy side and then also the corporate leadership side in how we’re going to shift that. What it looks like to us is 50% women and then also people of color woven throughout. We would actually love to see age and various other types of abilities and disabilities within that. Yet publicly traded companies, we have a pretty heavy lift to get there.

Gino Borges:

A lot of people have a lot of different assumptions around diversity. Of course, our personal experiences play into this. But, the larger case for making diversity as an essential as diligence is that it’s a risk issue at some level from what I read. If you’re not diversified, you’re actually exposing your company to more risk from a lack of inputs, a lack of collecting all of the intelligence as possible around a particular solution. How did you personally arrive at this conclusion, and did you experience any pushback when acknowledging diversity in finance?

Kristin Hull:

It’s a heated topic, and there’s plenty of research. The financial research is there although I would say the financial industry has been late to come to it. Many different sectors and spheres from psychology to innovation to anthropology have all documented the benefits of diverse leadership, everything from more innovation to rich conversations. In the finance world, there’s some fun facts. The minute you add women to the Board of Directors meeting, it starts on time. It’s true. Women actually read the board packets as far as stereotypes go. If you get enough women in there that are reading the board packet, the men start to read the board packet, too. Women tend to not vote on something or make decisions on something they don’t understand, so they ask questions.

Whereas men are streamlined through to get to the golf course as far as a lot of stereotypes go. That has been true in corporate America. It does slow up the process, but the research is finding that it makes more meaningful decisions. Another reason that makes sense to a lot of investors is that, on the stereotype side, men are better at short-term thinking, and women are better at long-term thinking. Wouldn’t you want those two types of thinking together in making decisions for your companies? There is tons of pushback. The men want to see the research, they want to know quantifiably how this is going to work. On the other hand, women know it makes sense. That’s been really interesting. Of course, if it were reversed and we were a 98% women-controlled economy, the men wouldn’t be asking for the research. They’d say, we want to diversify. It’s interesting that the people that make up the group, those empowered to making those decisions, are the ones that are demanding more research and really questioning this idea that we should change the status quo. That’s definitely been surprising to me. I have an academic background, so I like the research. I’m willing to go with that.

This week is climate week. There’s a lot of research-deniers, science-deniers. It’s definitely true in our financial industry as well, despite the data about better performance for companies and better portfolio management by women-led and people-of-color-led teams. Yet, so few of our teams are led by women or people of color. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Knight study. The Knight Foundation contracted with Harvard University. They put out a study in 2017 of asset managers. They also redid the study again January of this year. The numbers are terrible. The shifts really do need to happen. I think our people and our planet are depending on us to get more diversity into both corporate America and our finance industry.

Gino Borges:

Is the diversity for diversity’s sake? How do you vet out merit versus diversity? Is it possible we are losing efficiencies by accommodating diversity?

Kristin Hull:

I think it’s a myth. I know it’s a myth. It’s a significant part of the pushback.

Gino Borges:

All myths have some kernel of truth. Do you think it’s entirely a fabrication?

Kristin Hull:

The people saying those things haven’t met the women that are qualified. It may be true for them. But, what the research is saying is that groups want to choose from their own, and it’s much easier to reach within your own networks to get that next board member. If you bring on a golf buddy, you’re already in with them. You know their style, etc. So, your meetings can move forward without much change. There’s discomfort in the inviting someone unknown. It can be challenging. That’s one of the benefits to corporate leadership is that when someone is different, you do have to stop and lots of your practices get questioned because there’s someone new from outside the group. It’s almost like that uncomfortable piece is the additive piece sometimes.

Gino Borges:

Does it work in reverse? Last week, I was speaking with Lisa Curtis from Kuli Kuli Foods who started a moringa food company in the Bay Area. She said that she has a very difficult time receiving male applicants. As a woman founder of her organic food company, she says that the dominant amount of applications that she receives are all from women. Her emphasis and her struggle has been how to get men to actually apply for these particular jobs.

Kristin Hull:

That’s a great challenge to have. I welcome that challenge for sure.

Gino Borges:

At your firm, Nia Community, how many men are offering their perspective?

Kristin Hull:

We strive to be fully diverse and what I would love to do is add more diversity to our analyst team. That honestly has been really, really hard to come by because our financial industry isn’t very diverse. Finding analysts that have another perspective is something that Nia needs to thrive. But, because we’re in the financial industry, men are there and available for sure.

Gino Borges:

Is there a primal, natural attraction to one’s own kind? How do you educate people around that? It seems like there is this natural attraction to move toward others that look like, feel like, sound like, and live like you. Part of the crowd likes to shame. There’s another part that likes to educate. What are the different approaches that get at the virtues of cooperation over our first compulsion?

Kristin Hull:

I don’t experience that, and it might be because I grew up as a minority in Oakland. My first experiences in school were about collaborating and working together with people of all different backgrounds. I think those that are really truly interested in innovation know that they have blind spots, and they want those filled with people that think differently, that have different experience of the world, and that’s how they’re going to be more innovative. I think it’s a blind spot to think that more of our own is going to help anything. For me, I’ve always wanted to grow and do the very best work. I know that I’m going to need brains that are thinking differently than I am. I try to fill my team with very different people with diverse experiences and backgrounds.

Gino Borges:

What does your team currently look like right now in terms of diversity?

Kristin Hull:

You can look on our website, and you can see most of our team members are there. We have quite a few part-time people that didn’t make it to the website, but we’re pretty darn diverse. We probably lead heavily on the women as a women-owned firm, and we definitely have hired for values and core alignment and not so much for financial experience. Those are things that we can teach. I can definitely teach sustainable finance. In fact, that’s one of the main things we love doing. We have a “Change the Face of Finance” Internship program, and we love to welcome young women and people of color into that program so that they can get a taste of what does it mean to be in sustainable finance and take that with them. We have a similar philosophy and hiring from traditional finance isn’t really where we’re headed anyway. That experience hasn’t been prime as far as number one that you need to be on our team.

Gino Borges:

Take us through your journey of starting a financial firm. What were the challenges you faced in the process? What kept you going?

Kristin Hull:

Early on I was still pretty naive. I had discovered a missing hole as far as what was being offered in our financial markets, particularly in access to innovation and a solutions focus in public equities. Like many entrepreneurs, I thought “I will build it, and they will come.” My gift was to build it and then it would be available to the masses. That’s not at all how our financial industry works, and it’s not how they want to work. It’s a good thing I didn’t know all of these things getting started because, well, I probably would’ve started it anyway, but boy, it’s a heavy lift. It’s a heavy lift to get a new product to market. In particular, being female, our systems aren’t set up for that and they’re not set up for small teams. They’re not set up for products that are so different and that are not trying to be a benchmark. Right now, public equities with modern portfolio theory and the invention of indexing, which became popular in the 90s, we have moved from individual stock selection to buying one ticker symbol that has 500 stocks or 3000 companies behind that. To bring in transparency and make careful selections in a concentrated small portfolio that does impact reports every quarter and does educational materials, it’s a lot for people to wrap their brain about why they would want it. How is its offering so much more or a different way to access investing than some of the other products that are their “go-to.” Easy, literally “click a box” products. It’s definitely been a heavy lift. I do a lot of educating and explaining, showing our fact sheet to walk people through how we’re outperforming, where the outperformance comes from, how our stock selection and our criteria actually can outperform the market. One of the myths that we’re still trying to overcome is that you can do good or you can do well. We actually find that financially we’re going to do better by investing in the solutions that people need and that the planet requires. Yet, that’s not a commonly held belief yet. So, I do a lot of explaining. What keeps me going are presentations where investors go, “wow, that is refreshing. It’s different. I can own companies that are outside of the norm and I can actually do better. And, I can know that, of course, I don’t have any fossil fuels or weapons or ammo distributors. But, actually all of my money’s really invested into the world that I want to see.” To the extent that we can connect those dots, it’ll get easier. Yet, the big banks have these emerging manager programs that have not been successful because many need to have $500 million under management to be qualified. Others, you need to have 25 full-time employees. The barriers are quite high, impossibly high. They’re really impossibly high to get to some of these things. To have the distribution that makes a small team, a small firm sustainable is almost impossible to get to, and yet we’re getting there. So, the challenge is real.

Gino Borges:

How do you stay centered in that storm? What practice or tools do you use on a daily basis to actually stay centered in the midst of rejection and operational stresses?

Kristin Hull:

Sustainability begins at home, within. If I want a sustainable planet that’s inclusive, I need to be sustainable and my team has to be sustainable. Today, we are walking around Lake Merritt in Oakland and will have lunch at Lake Chalet to do our brainstorming about our next quarter. We’re going to do it outside on the lake; we take our meetings outside when we can. We also participate in a lot of community events that keep us grounded in what’s important and what’s real. Nia sponsors so many social justice and environmental organizations in our local community, and we love to be among other change makers. That’s really important for us: to build community around the work we’re doing. Even though, yes, it feels really isolating in the public market work. The rest of the work, there’s so many people working hard. Being able to do that together is helpful. Additionally, I have an impactful women’s group to support organizing women in the impact investing space. I’m also part of a fabulous group of women CEOs of B corporations. The B Corp movement is wonderful. It actually was led by three men, and it still needs to be diversified. Women CEOs are between 10 and 15% of the B corps; people of color, much less than that. So, we actually have our work to do within that movement. Gathering with our people has been really important. One of the organizations we support is Outdoor Afro; we organized a group rafting trip for women leaders this summer. That was so fun to be on the rivers, learning about our California river system and just having fun pushing our edges with awesome women.

On the personal side, for me, getting outside is super important. I have a yoga practice, I have a meditation practice, and I hike with my dog. But, it’s really building community of change makers. That is what keeps me going. The other thing is that as the light bulbs go off for people. Whether they become Nia clients or not isn’t really our main objective. That might be part of our problem. We just want people to invest and feel really aligned to a portfolio that is really reflective of themselves, one where they can see themselves in their investments and that their investments are an extension of them and their goals so they can shift their money into the economy that they really want to have.

When those light bulbs go off, we get excited and that propels us forward in this heavy lift. The “No’s” that you mentioned are really just “Not now’s.” Several years ago, one of the headlines had come out for one of the things that Wells Fargo was experiencing; there were too many to keep track of. I said to somebody at Wells Fargo that it might be interesting to look at Nia as a possibility to retain some of your clients and offer some value and some transparency. They said, “no, that is never going to happen.” They cut me off and said “Wells will never be interested.” I thought, “well that’s too bad.” We got a call recently saying “we [Wells Fargo] need to have Nia on the platform.” Things are shifting. The type of transparency we offer, the type of gender-lens that is so deep and woven throughout everything we do, and of course, the financial performance is becoming interesting to people. We’re going to stay in there until everyone has access to some kind of product like Nia.

Gino Borges:

What issues are attracting people the most when gender bumps up against it? Is it wealth inequality? Is it climate? What is the intersection of gender and other impact issues? How is gender used as a catalyst to amplify other issues?

Kristin Hull:

That is the topic of the day. We can’t separate gender from our decisions. We have; we’re looking first at products and services. All of them have to be beneficial to women and girls on some level. That’s where we start our process. We are very much in alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. To achieve any one of those goals without doing it with a gender-lens is going to be really, really hard. You’ve probably heard it said that climate change is a manmade problem and it requires a feminist solution. It’s not untrue about investing, about building a portfolio, about thinking about products and services as well as management team. I would attribute our good returns to having woven those two together because there are gender-lens products and there are sustainable or green products, but there isn’t anyone else doing it the way we’re doing it. That might be part of our secret sauce.

Gino Borges:

What does that look like in reality?

Kristin Hull:

Let’s look at Etsy for example. 89% of the sellers are women. We love that they do a really good job of educating their sellers about building websites, about e-commerce, about packaging and sustainable ways. We like that women who are raising kids can work from home. The empowerment of women is a big lens for Etsy. We don’t mind that they’re taking market share away from Amazon. We like that, too. There’s some interesting things there. Another example in Japan, up until Resona Holdings, women could deposit money in banks, but they couldn’t take it out as a product, as a loan. Resona is basically solving for something that was missing in the market and they’re doing really well there. Also, in Japan, it’s not very common to have women in leadership. Resona Holdings has women not only on the board, but it’s vertical and it’s horizontal because branch managers are women. That translates into products built for women and also for elderly that have been discriminated against in banking as well in Japan. Those are a couple examples. I would say our tech industry hasn’t been leading as far as including women. Yet, we have some awesome companies there. Vestas is a fabulous Danish company doing wind, and they are actually part of the Hawthorn Club, the network which we encourage all of our energy companies to join because that is where the badass women in energy hangout. If you are looking at building your pipeline, building your board, building your employee base, that’s a really great place to be invested as they are leading and sponsoring. I hope that gives you a sense of how we’re thinking about products issues and company selection.

Gino Borges:

As we wrap up, was there something that emerged within you during the last hour that you would like to share?

Kristin Hull:

I just want to share my appreciation, Gino, for your willingness to highlight the stories of those of us that are really trying to work at systems-change and recognizing that it can be lonely here, trying to change a system, paddling upstream. Sometimes, our rivers are polluted. Sometimes, there’s a current of happiness. There is a lot going on in here, and to be able to share this story has been really great. Your questions have made me think about what is the story, what is the work, and how can we involve more people to bring as many into this fold. It’s going to be more fun that way and we’re going to get the work done in a way where Greta will be happy if we join together.

Gino Borges:

Good old, Greta. She’s taken America by storm this past week.

Kristin Hull:

Thank God! And, there are other awesome young girls of color doing that work. Greta is our hero right now, and yet we do need to follow all of the youth who are really engaging and trying to hold our leadership accountable.