Sure. It’s a bit difficult to describe for Americans in particular. I mean, you think about how old Europe is, right? My husband, the first time he came to Cologne, he was blown away by the Roman ruins in the city.

It’s hard to appreciate the age of this city. I remember being like nine or ten years old when it celebrated its 2,000th birthday.

Of course, there is also some very ancient history in North America but it doesn’t tend to be expressed in monumental cathedrals and other ancient architecture.

We know Cologne’s monumental Cathedral is sitting on top of a bunch of prior churches that are sitting on top of a bunch of earlier temples. So that has been a very sacred space for literally millennia. I like to joke that every time they dig a subway tunnel in Cologne, they find either more ruins — or unexploded ordnance from World War II.

You know, Cologne was bombed pretty badly. And the rebuilt city is spectacularly ugly. It’s still got the Gothic Cathedral but everything else was bombed to smithereens so they rebuilt the old part of town. But the general face of the city is sort of mid-century modern and not in a good way.

Yes, I just turned fifty this last year, and the Greens were definitely still sort of a far-left Splinter party when I was a teen. But now today, there’s one thing that people don’t really appreciate about Germany. We actually ended up with what I think is the single best democracy in the world, after having been the worst aggressor of the 20th century. We created this beautiful multiparty democracy — which today includes the Greens.

They came out of the anti-nuclear movement — that was the rallying cry in the late 70s, early 80s. And a lot of the Green leadership came out of the student protest movement of the late 60s.

Those people who created the Green Party, they ended up in power for a period, and they’re now in power again. We’ve had a Green foreign minister. And the Food and Ag minister, not surprisingly, is a Green Party member who is Turkish-German — so it’s the first time that we have had a Turkish-German minister in the cabinet. So yes, the Greens are definitely part of my formative experience.

I was too young. Not to say that I didn’t have friends who got into the student politics of it all. When I was about fourteen, I went to a boarding school on Lake Constance. And from there, I really began my international meandering. I left Germany when I was sixteen to go to an international high school in Canada, and so I didn’t really get involved in politics that much.

My economics teacher in high school, a place with the remit to educate the next generation of global leaders, he really brought a very holistic perspective to economics. He had personal experience with what was then called developing countries, and the detrimental effects of the predominant economic paradigms on local populations.

I ended up going to the University of St. Andrews to take a joint honors program in economics and philosophy. They are right in the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment, which is a weird way to say that David Hume was an influence. And Adam Smith, because I literally went to school down the road from where he grew up and worked.

Yes. That was the influence of Richard Norgaard, one of the founders of ecological economics, who was really the reason I went to UC Berkeley to do my Ph.D.

Oh yes — it was literally the only program I applied to in the U.S.

Well I really didn’t want to work with anybody other than Dick. I had read his book Development Betrayed as an undergrad. So then I really wasn’t interested in going anywhere else.

I was interested in how humans really don’t understand nature very well, unless we can think of it as natural resources, i.e., something to be extracted and mined and turned into quote, unquote, useful things.

There are areas like mining and oil and diamonds and growing food, in which we’re extractive in nature. But I was curious about how nature becomes a natural resource. What’s that shift? I mean, it’s such a social construct.

And what was wild about this time — you’ll remember this — the Rio Conference was just happening in 1992, the first United Nations Earth Conference. The new discussion about the need to preserve nature and preserve the Amazon rainforest.

And you had these just wildly divergent estimates and opinions about how valuable the rainforest is as a source of potential future economic value to humanity. And one area where this played out was like, you know, in estimating the future value of the rainforest in giving us life-saving drugs. And the estimates were literally off by four orders of magnitude. So I started digging into how we come up with these estimates of the value of nature. And come to find out that not surprisingly, it’s a total construct.

I founded Good Scout Capital with Karlo Marcelo, whom I met in graduate school at the University of Michigan. We were both in the Public Policy program and both focused our studies on poverty, racial equity, and the working poor. We became fast friends and have remained peers in the space over the last twenty years. About two years ago we began to develop Good Scout to fill an investment and impact gap that would benefit investors, operators, and workers. To create Good Scout, I applied the lessons I learned as a former community organizer and private equity executive, blending unique and complementary skill sets and experiences.

It is! Over twelve years as Principal at Renewable Resources Group (RRG), I developed a 1.6 gigawatt solar energy portfolio and created the first farm labor cooperative in the U.S. — California Harvesters, Inc. The energy portfolio included one of the largest solar photovoltaic projects operating in the world today and was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.

The projects included union contracts and other environmental benefits beyond the clean energy production. California Harvesters is one of the largest farm labor service companies today, employing 1,200 farm workers with annual revenues of $10M. I served as Chair of the Board for the first four years, raised capital, and supported the management and operations team at California Harvesters. RRG, Ford Foundation, Democracy at Work Institute, The Working World and The Workers Lab were important partners in launching CHI and I’m so grateful for their contributions.

These two examples of solar energy and cooperative businesses made clear to me that capital can accelerate environmental and social change at scale, and revealed some things that informed the investment strategy and the DEI thesis for Good Scout Capital.

First, we need to simplify the cooperative model in early-stage enterprises. We also saw that financing products for seed and early stage SMEs, which are often led by diverse entrepreneurs, are limited — and yet they are critical to innovation in the space.

Then there’s the way that capital and impact investors can play the same role in accelerating change in wealth and income inequality as they did for climate change — by including workers in the capital stack.

And finally, in order to attract investors to labor- and gig-focused businesses we need to de-risk the investment with a diversified portfolio and an active PE team that provides back office support to the portfolio companies.

Exactly. It’s a model that can be replicated and now we have better lessons to execute it. The way I look at it, we raised $5M to capitalize the farm labor cooperative and that was also a $5M investment in learning about how to bring this to scale. These concepts of employee ownership are actually mainstream now. Just look at what KKR has done with their industrials or how Pete Stavros launched Ownership Works, a new nonprofit focused on the same principles we created at Good Scout. It’s a really exciting time in the employee ownership capital space.