Removing bias in a fight for social and economic justice

Written By Paula Neme

Over the course of the last few decades, research shows that entrepreneurial women produce higher net income with a lower capital input cost than men, across the board. So, why is it that we still have an unconscious bias towards women led enterprises? Especially those with indigenous and women of colour founders? Less than 2% of funding often flows to them, yet their contribution to society is huge--UN data shows for every $1 a woman earns up to 90% flows to her families and communities as opposed to men flowing only up to 30%.

Meet Laina Raveendran Greene, the EHF Fellow who is defying and tackling these stereotypes from the front line, by flipping the narrative on bias and amplifying the need for unity to create a just and regenerative world for all.

 

Understanding unconscious bias and the role it plays

Before you can create a movement and begin to unravel the countless obstacles ahead of you, you must first take a look back at the narrative that led you there in the first place. These narratives are often forefronted by an underlying bias that is incredibly difficult to understand and confront.

Recent global events like the COVID-19 pandemic, have begun to shine a light on our most vulnerable and under-privileged communities and individuals, allowing society to begin to unravel and recognise the spider-web of assumptions, decisions and bias that they hold. The system we have today is not broken, it is fixed--it works for the people it was designed to benefit and this is not marginalised communities.

People often view the world very linearly and transactionally. We trade x for y and everything must have a benefit for the individual. However, Laina views the world in a circular way. She also views it in a way that the marginalised people are the key to our future. In 2017, she co-authored a book “Sustainable Impact: How women are key to ending poverty” to change mindsets about how they view women as change agents.

She recognises that with 500 years of colonisation,  land and people have become commoditized. Poverty and Climate change, among many of the other challenges can be tied back to this very extractive and transactional world, where the key aim was profit maximising for the few at the expense of land and people. The time has come to go back to non-transactional, transformational wisdom that Laina believes we need more than ever - indigenous wisdom.  We need to support the community weavers and keepers of wisdom regenerating the fabric of their communities through entrepreneurship, who are struggling for access to resources and networks.

“We often think if we solve all the problems of the world, we will have unity and world peace. But we must have unity first in order to solve all these problems. We must work in a truly united and inter-connected way with land and people. We are one people and the earth is one country. We need to stop looking at transactional thinking, but instead transformative thinking for the betterment of the world.”

 

Meet the women behind the movement

In September of 2015, the United Nations and adopting countries, officially put into action the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with a plan to see them come into fruition by 2030. 

Among these 17 goals were three that stood out to Laina; No Poverty (1); Gender Equality (5) and Responsible Consumption and Production (12) and it was then she decided she wanted to create Angels of Impact, an organisation whose mission is to elevate and include women and indigenous communities as key solutions to a more equitable and regenerative world. Angels of Impact is headquartered in Singapore, and was started by a group of successful entrepreneurs who believed in investing in women as the key to ending poverty and addressing climate issues.

The daughter of Indian immigrants, Laina was raised in Singapore and later moved first to Switzerland where she did her graduate studies in international law, and worked with the United Nations doing policy making and treaty drafting at the International Telecommunications Union. She then moved to the United States to first work at the International Satellite Organisation, and later to study Law at Harvard returning to Singapore where she co-Founded GetIt (now GetItComms), one of the first  women-founded tech businesses at the time. Having sold that business in 2006, she began to focus on social impact investing to empower other women social entrepreneurs, having experienced first hand how hard it was to raise funding as a woman of colour.

 

Helping to flip the narrative in Aotearoa

Through her work as a Co-Founder of Angels of Impact, Laina has recently set up a fund in New Zealand where donors can give tax deductible donations to support their work in New Zealand. 

The goal of Angels of Impact in New Zealand is to enable marginalised communities to uplift themselves out of poverty, promote gender equality and create regenerative economies. The fund is run through a local partner; The Gift Trust, a New Zealand registered charity and donor-advised fund that helps people wanting to make donations to charitable causes to do so more efficiently. GiftTrustNZ was introduced to Angels of Impact through RSF Social Finance in the US, and together the three organisations intend to collaborate to develop new forms of restorative and integrated finance mechanisms in New Zealand to help marginalised communities thrive for the wellbeing of the nation.

The reason Angels of Impact run the Evergreen fund from donations, is that this allows us to come up with more flexible and less extractive ways of financing marginalised communities than if they did it as a traditional Fund structure. The Monitor Group report studying over 3,000 social enterprises all over the world, also came to a similar conclusion that impact investors shy from funding poverty alleviation for cost of capital and expected returns reasons for instance, and that report called for “enterprise philanthropy’. Acumen and Kiva also use similar models and Angels of Impact constantly seek new models hence our collaboration with GiftTrust and RSFSocial Finance. In addition to the Evergreen Fund, they hope to create a new Social Justice Impact Fund in New Zealand working with regulators and investors.

Since setting up in their New Zealand division of Angels of Impact, Laina has directly worked with a number of New Zealand organisations including supporting EHF Fellow Faumuina Tafunai in her work, The Choose Hope programme, a suicide-prevention programme that guides young Maori to create solutions to navigate to their island of success. She is also working closely with another EHF fellow Lily Stender with the Tolaga Bay Innovation Center programs together with other EHF Fellows such as Chris Myers..

Prior to branching out into New Zealand, Angels of Impact have empowered women social entrepreneurs across ASEAN with capacity building, capital and market access for four years, and hopes to bring those insights into New Zealand. They also hope to facilitate an exchange of ideas and success stories between women-led social enterprises in both regions. Their goal is to support local entrepreneurial “sheroes” out of the “valley of death” and convert their businesses into thriving models of  just and regenerative economies.

Angels of Impact constantly uses applied research in their work. Most recently, they examined funding gaps faced by women-led SMEs in Myanmar, Indonesia and Thailand through human centered research, and released a research report in 2019.  In 2019 also, Angels of Impact went through a reorganisation, where former co-founders also EHF Fellows, split off to form  a separate independent company to run an impact tracking block chain platform called Circles of Angels . This split enables Angels of Impact to continue to focus on its mission of funding and capacity building, without needing to own and run its own tech platform, and this renewed focus enabled them to explore expanding their operations into New Zealand. Meanwhile, Ms Pia Bruce, former Executive Director of UN Women Singapore Committee has joined the re-organised Angels of Impact founding team in Singapore, and EHF Fellow Joshua Fouts, former Executive Director of Bioneers, has joined the team for its work in New Zealand.

As Laina and Angels of Impact continue to pave the way for women and indigenous communities around the world, she is committed to creating a deep impact in New Zealand by connecting with and working with funders  who care about poverty, women, and social justice.

“Be at the forefront of removing prejudice for the wellbeing of humanity. Uplift marginalized and indigenous communities and never stop trying to recognise, un-pack and tackle your own unconscious bias. I truly believe New Zealand can lead the world in restorative finance for a just and regenerative world.”

 

How to get involved

Get a copy of our book “Sustainable Impact: How women are key to ending poverty” on Amazon to learn more about how women are key to ending poverty and check out our reports on the website http://www.angelsofimpact.com/reports.html Listen to our TEDxSingaporewomen talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuepOWFAszo if you feel compelled to join our effort, we are looking for new funders to join our network for our Evergreen Fund. Donations can be made into the Angels of Impact fund with The Gift Trust here: https://www.thegifttrust.org.nz/donate-now

*Please use the reference ‘Angels of Impact’ as the Gift Account name.

 

Journey with us

Impact is a journey and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a group of inspired, committed, and informed individuals to get a world-changing idea off the ground. You can help amplify EHF Fellow impact as they work to develop solutions to some of humanity’s biggest problems. Here is how you can join us in this work as we journey together on a path to a better world:

Paula Neme
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