And the winner is…
As this issue goes out I have just returned from the annual SRI Conference. In the coming months we’ll share more from that event. This year I was one of four nominees for the 2017 SRI Service Award which recognizes an individual for outstanding contributions to the SRI/ESG industry. I am honored to be this year’s award recipient along with Dr. Richard Liroff of the Investor Environmental Health Network.
Now on to this November issue: It is our first-ever “Money Stories” issue. The writers, including myself, tell their personal life-long “Money Stories” and their many financial influences along the way. Please take the opportunity to think about your own story. Also, in case you missed the Sept/Oct “25th Anniversary Issue – Part 2” featuring Mary Barra, CEO of GM (recently named the Most Powerful Woman in Business by Fortune), you can still access all the exclusive articles.
– Cliff Feigenbaum, founder
From Noble Poverty to my Brand of Joy by Carrie B. VanWinkle, CFP®, Natural Investments
For my first 40 years I lived a life of noble poverty. When I heard the term “noble poverty,” I had a visceral reaction in my heart and my gut. I felt deeply understood. I experienced a relief of having named a condition I had lived with since I was a child. The term is defined as “the belief that there is virtue in not having money and that good people do not have it.” People with this mindset live by the phrase “it is better to be good and poor than rich and evil.”
Now I understand that this mindset is based on a false dichotomy that you can have one or the other, and not both. That a person does not need to live a life of scarcity and deprivation and that these are not the same as mindful simplicity and living in a conscious intentional relationship with money.
Doubling Down on Impact: Leveraging all that I have for the World I want to see by Kristin Hull, PhD, Founder and CEO, Nia Impact Advisors
As an impact investor, a financial change agent and entrepreneur, my money story centers around aligning assets with values. Nia Impact Advisors moves investment dollars into the companies working to create the world we want to live in. I come by this work having grown up immersed in the financial markets.
As a child, money was tight; often a stressful topic at our house. Money messages included being prudent, entrepreneurial and thrifty. I wore hand-me-down clothes, planted seeds in our victory garden and overheard as my parents argued over whose turn it was to pick up the food stamps. My father taught math at a local HS and then took to the streets as a Fuller Brush salesman in the evenings. To bring in additional income, my mom corrected English papers and my father managed apartments to reduce our rent. I learned about the importance of saving money, of looking for opportunities, and of working hard.
It’s Monday Morning by Timothy Karsten, Life and Business Strategist
It’s Monday morning, my week begins by greeting the sunrise from our garden that faces East. A few minutes of taking in the energy that provides us so many benefits every day, and then some meditation, establishes the foundation for all else. Next is a stroll through the garden to see what flowers have opened up and which fruits and veggies have emerged and ripened.
Once this routine is complete, it is time to enter into the technological universe with a quick online review of Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. What is happening on the global stage and in the financial markets? How are the markets doing and how might global factors and the events of the day impact the people that I work with? These rituals reflect the journey I take every day, continually discovering how to better integrate the worlds of organic creativity and spirit with the complex interplay of finance, business, and human relationships.
The Magic of Money and Other Cautionary Tales
by Cliff Feigenbaum, Founder, GreenMoney Journal
It began with a magic trick. When I was young a friend of my father’s would pull a quarter out from behind my ear and then make it disappear again. This became an apt metaphor for my relationship with money: one moment there and the next moment gone, feeding two powerful feelings about money: insecurity and lots of fear about never getting it back. My next memory of money was of being gifted with Kennedy silver half dollars on my birthdays (one for each year). I still have a few of the coins today.
My family was financially pretty comfortable. We lived in Malibu in the late 60s and the early 70s just a couple of miles from the beach. But as these things go, change was on the way, a big change. My Dad quit his job as a successful salesman for 3M in LA and we moved to an old farm in the Northwest.