From Conflict to Confluence of Interest
By Rachel Robasciotti, Tara Health Foundation Board Member and Founder and Co-CEO of Adasina Social Capital
When we shift power to those most proximate to our work, we find confluence, not conflict, of interest.
We know people with direct experience are best positioned to make decisions about the issues they face, and that they’ll likely benefit from those decisions personally. This is where, as I say in my conversation with Nwamaka Agbo, founding CEO of Kataly Foundation and managing director of Kataly’s Restorative Economies Fund: “It gets messy.”
I encountered that messiness when Ruth Shaber, recruited me to join Tara Health’s new board, one intentionally composed of people more proximate to the issues the foundation was trying to address. One of our earliest priorities was developing a strategy for supporting the ecosystem of BIPOC-led asset managers. As someone embedded in that ecosystem, I was naturally a key advisor on how the foundation could invest in it with the most impact.
As a Black woman from a resource-scarce background in a field dominated by wealthy white men, my lived experience shaped the work I was doing at Adasina Social Capital—redefining long-held, limiting paradigms about what constituted value in an investment. By accounting for social justice impact, we were opening the field up to more holistic, robust, and therefore effective investing. This was exactly the kind of work Tara Health was looking to support.
So it didn’t make sense that, when faced with the decision to extend funding and loans to this very ecosystem, the default assumption—the one that governs most boards—was that good governance and legal compliance required excluding Adasina from consideration because of my role as a Board member. This hurt. It was one of countless moments when I was invited into a room to inform decisions but, with the spectre of conflict of interest looming, was excluded from the subsequent benefits.
This is a pattern that plays out across philanthropy (and beyond): Policies designed to protect integrity end up reproducing the very exclusion they should prevent, keeping proximate leaders at the table for input but pushing them out when resources are distributed.
As I share in conversation with Nwamaka, I raised this with my fellow board members, and to their immense credit, they were willing to question the assumption.
Working with Tara Health’s lawyers, we discovered what many boards never learn: the law allows for far more nuance than the field typically practices. There were ways to keep Adasina in consideration while maintaining full legal compliance.
I recused myself from the decision, and my colleagues on the Board, in integrity with Tara Health’s mission as well as the letter of the law, decided to support Adasina—not because I would personally benefit from that support, but because of Adasina’s role and value in building models for investing that move us toward the future we all want and need.
Rather than a conflict of interest, the Board at Tara Health found, in Nwamaka’s elegant framing, a confluence of interest, exhibiting the complexity, nuance, and care that a more regenerative and inclusive economic system requires.
This is a lesson and way of being that has cascaded through our work at Adasina. We recently announced a transition to broad-based employee ownership. This move, which shifts power and wealth to Adasina employees, wouldn’t have been possible without the headwaters of Tara Health’s early support, the confluence of which continues to move us toward a more fair and just future.And the lesson extends far beyond Tara Health and Adasina. We know boards across the field are grappling with the same tension, too often defaulting to exclusion in the name of compliance. But the law allows for more than we've been practicing. The invitation is to find out what's actually possible.
Adasina Social Capital creates innovative investment products that seek aligned social justice returns. As both a past grantee and an investee of Tara Health Foundation, Adasina has led the way in creating tools, community, and resources for values-aligned investing.
The Kataly Foundation moves resources to support the economic, political, and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color. We find inspiration and wisdom in how they redefine relationships to capital, the planet, and each other in their work to redistribute wealth and power.
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