.jpeg)
Konda Mason is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Grammy Award-winning music producer and the co-founder and former CEO of Impact HUB Oakland. When it comes to finance and the economy, however, it is the fact that Konda has one of the most expansive, soulful and brilliant minds that makes her a true leader.
Her bio is cause enough to drop the mic. She directs a micro-lending fund for African American entrepreneurs, started The Wellbeing In Business Lab and the Community Capital Conference in Oakland, which focuses on “Building the We Economy.” Konda’s work is fuelled by a passion to witness in her lifetime a world that is environmentally regenerative, spiritually fulfilling, socially just and economically equitable.
This conversation between Konda and Small Giants co-founder Berry Liberman is extracted from Issue 55 of Dumbo Feather Magazine: Creating the Next Economy
Berry Liberman: So I’ve heard rumours that you’ve been nominated for Grammys and an Oscar.
Konda Mason: Oh yeah.
How did you get from the music and film world to the social justice entrepreneurial and impact investing world?
Oh it’s all the same. Honestly. The films that I have been involved in have everything to do with change and are just another way of delivering it through the media. And media is very powerful. It’s really important that media is filled with activists, right? Filled with change-makers. So a lot of the media that I did was that. The film that me and my friend, Dianne Houston, got nominated for an Academy Award for was a short film called Tuesday Morning Ride. It’s a really interesting movie that pissed a lot of people off. Other people cry at the end of it.
So you came from the storytelling world, storytelling being both music and film.
Yes. And theatre. I did a lot of theatre in New York. Love theatre.
And then you became one of the founders and CEO of Impact Hub Oakland. Can you explain what Impact Hub Oakland is and why it’s so important in the landscape of social justice?
My life unfolds in a way that I get these deep taps on the shoulder from this internal voice. And I got tapped by a group of people who own the Hub in San Francisco. Impact Hubs are a network of co-working spaces, there’s over a hundred around the world, but at the time there was only 30-something. They tapped me because I spoke at SOCAP on a panel with three black women colleagues, and we were was dissing a lot of these impact investors who are doing great work in Africa and Asia and South America and I was like, “What about in your own backyard?” And so we did this panel and all of the sudden I realised nobody was investing in my own town, Oakland. And yet millions of dollars going out there in the world. So at the end of it the people who own Hub San Francisco said to me and my colleagues, “You should open up a hub in Oakland.” I was like, “I’m not interested in that.” The only hub I knew was the one in San Francisco. And it was filled with a bunch of white middle-class millennial tech guys doing their techie thing.
I thought, It’s great that this happens. But that’s not what I’m interested in. And then in the middle of the night, which is where a lot of my intuition comes, I realised, It doesn’t have to be that. It can be something totally different. It can be what you want it to be. What I wanted it to be was a space where this movement—what my dear friend Paul Hawken may call “this blessed unrest movement”—was centre. So the real remaking of a world with a spiritual underpinning focused on economic equity and social justice.
So at Impact Hub Oakland our front is that we are a co-working space. What we really are is a place of deeper transformation. Yes, people come and co-work, but there’s a deeper conversation happening there all the time. We have amazing events. One of the things that I created with another partner is called COCAP, which is a conference around building the “we” economy. One of my biggest paths on this planet right now has been to address the wealth gap. I grew up as somebody who didn’t have much. I’m from the most devastated communities that weren’t invested in, that aren’t invested in. And I know the beauty of the people who need more resources. But the resources we have are also priceless.
So let’s talk about that. We were together just recently talking about the different kinds of capital.
Well I would say there is an unlimited, absolutely abundant unlimited amount of spiritual and social capital available to us. And financial capital, I don’t know how unlimited that is. I go back to the neighbourhood that I grew up in, or any neighbourhoods that are quote unquote “under resourced.” What you will find, typically, is huge social capital. It’s about family. It’s about community. It’s about what people are now calling the sharing economy. The sharing economy is just a way that people have lived forever who have depended upon each other and shared our resources together to take the next step in life.
Are we going to get lost calling it the share economy and love capital and social capital? Financial capital needs to come off its pedestal.
We have given our power to money. And money is what we think makes us powerful. And what’s powerful is our time with each other. What’s powerful is the time that I spend with you. What’s powerful is the time that I spend going to the hospital with my sister, taking care of my neighbour’s cat. We look at the meaningful things and they seem so small. Because we're all trying to do such big things. I just want to get a grip that as we’re doing all these big and wonderful things, saving the world, also ask, do you know your neighbour? Do you know the person who is cleaning your building? Are we part of each other’s world? We have to see each other. Not be afraid to fill each other’s hearts. And there’s so much fear. We're driven by fear, lack, all of that.
How do we get beyond it?
Hmm. It’s interesting how crises bring us together. If a crisis was to happen right now in your neighbourhood and you don’t know your neighbours, people suddenly are out in the streets getting to know each other. But after the crisis is over, we go our way. And that shows me that we are built to care for each other. It is our natural DNA to care and support each other and collaborate. That is really who we are. So we have to walk towards each other.
Can we talk about your very special life? Because the thing that moves me about your life, I tell a lot of people about it. Half your life is devoted to your spiritual practice. And half your life is devoted to your work in the world. Can you talk about that and also the remarkable opportunity you have to be one of the last students of Jack Kornfield, one of the great spiritual teachers on the planet.
Yeah. It’s a blessing. I met Jack in 1995. He just out of the blue reached out to me. I got a phone call from Jack Kornfield! And I was like Jack Kornfield? It was crazy. And it was really Jack, I thought it was a hoax. And he’d gotten my number from someone and he wanted me to teach with him. I was a yoga teacher at the time. And I said, “Absolutely I’ll teach with you. Are you fucking kidding me?” And so I get on a plane and I meet Jack Kornfield. And he’s been in my world ever since. And then I started coming to Spirit Rock and working and being a yoga teacher at his retreats.
Could you explain just quickly what Spirit Rock is?
Spirit Rock is a Theravada Buddhism meditation centre which is the meditation of insight meditation, Vipassana meditation. It is the centre here on the west coast, the biggest one. So I now, having moved out of the CEO position of Impact Hub Oakland, I am now in this four-year course, which is requiring a lot of me. There’s a lot of study. Like I’m back in school, and I love it. I’m really learning the dharma. And I am teaching and I am sitting. The other part of my life is in the world of business and finance. And how the two must come together. Because what I believe is that we, as I said earlier, we are all deeply interconnected—to each other, to the planet, to that species over there, to that tree, to the air, to all of it. We live our lives in our business life and in finance as if we are not connected. ’Cause if we were deeply connected, if we worked from that place, if we invested from that place, we could not do the kind of harm that we are doing.
What has happened is that we have separated ourselves from our own interior and from each other and from all life. We as human beings use life as a resource. We use this planet as a resource. That tree is a resource that I have dominion over. That relationship is devastating. All life is sacred. And the planet is a living planet. That’s the story that we need to be telling. Instead, we are financing the destruction of our own living planet. Who destroys their own home? And we can put on our blinders and put up our walls and our fences and not look at it and continue to look at the bank account and make sure that we are continuing to make that money. Investments are going good. As investments go up, resources go down. It has an inverse relationship. As this GDP goes up, the planet goes down. What about your children? What about your children’s children? We are completely delusional if we think we’re going to get away with this. We’re all suffering. We’re suffering from our separation, we are trying to buy our way out of our suffering.
So I would love you to articulate that incredible quadrant that you talk about as a way for everybody to sort of place themselves in this in a pragmatic way. Some people might read this conversation and just be overcome by despair. But you know, between despair and denial is action. But that has a nuance to it. And you’ve got a great way of articulating that nuance.
In any movement for change there are these four quadrants. And people are typically drawn more to one than the other. Doesn’t mean that you’re only one. But you have a proclivity towards one more than the other. And they all start with the word “R.” So there’s the quadrant of “resist.” There are people who are resisters. They resist the current system that is happening right now, and okay, I’m in America, you know who’s the President of the United States, you know who’s running our government. He who goes unnamed. There is a lot of resistance to this regime and it’s really important. The women’s march is an example of resistance.
The next quadrant is “reform.” The reform quadrant is people who are on the inside of the system. They’re reforming it from the inside. They say, “The only way to do this is to be in government or to be in whatever it might be, the system,” and you may be working in Silicon Valley and you’re really trying to get more diversity, say, you are reforming the place that you work. And that is really important.
Then there are the “re-creators.” And the re-creators are like, “You know what? I am over here outside of the system and I’m going to create a new world. I am re-creating.” And my place at Impact Hub Oakland is filled with a lot of re-creators, right? Re-creating a new system that has no waste, for example.
The fourth quadrant is “re-imagine.” The re-imaginers are actually out front, way out front, saying, “Come this direction. I have a vision of what the world can look like.” And the re-imaginers can’t do any of it if you don’t have what you’re working towards instead of what you’re working against. And the re-imaginers are those folks who are mainly creatives.‘Cause there’s never a movement without art leading and being a major part of it. Art is vital. The artist, the magicians, the seers. And so those are the four quadrants: resist, reform, re-create and re-imagine. And everybody’s doing their part. And with all of it, change happens. But often what happens is that we set ourselves in one quadrant and say, “That’s not going to work. Why are you resisting? Why are you inside the system? Get out of the system!” No, no, no, no, no, all of it is necessary. And that is what is going to bring about the kind of transformation that we want to happen with the planet.
