About Programs Fellowship News Calendar
Salzburg Global Fellow Murray Gray reflects on (re)connecting capital(s) to communities
In June 2023, Salzburg Global Seminar curated a group of around 50 participants from around the world with a shared question: how do we better connect capital to communities to fund essential social infrastructure in the form of food, housing, and water?
The group spanned participants from a range of contexts. From global institutions like the IMF and OECD in New York and Paris, to entrepreneurs on the ground building affordable houses in Mozambique or building the infrastructure to connect smallholders farmers to markets across India. From funders at global institutions in Seattle, Amsterdam and Nairobi to nonprofits supporting direct action on the ground in Mexico to the Philippines.
There was an overwhelming depth and breadth of experience, expertise, and wisdom in the room. I stepped in as someone with less technical finance expertise than most. Here are some of the key (non-technical) lessons that emerged for me that I hope can trigger some thoughts for those working on directing finance to community-led solutions.
To change the world, change yourself, then change how you work in small groups before you enact big change. Patterns scale upward and downward.
It is said that change is fractal: the micro reflects the macro, the macro reflects the micro. The issues outlined above are ones we face globally. These are reflected in smaller groups. They are reflected deep within ourselves. Reshaping global power dynamics, relationships, and collaboration requires us to start with inner transformation.
Despite the inspiring, thoughtful, talented, motivated group we had, we fractally reflected the macro challenge we were tackling. We experienced certain power dynamics. We found it difficult to coordinate and collaborate cross-boundary. We found it hard to deeply listen to each other. We found it difficult to hold space so that everyone could contribute. We found it hard to sensemake together based on the different frames, perspectives, and experiences people brought in.
The larger the group we had, the more Europeans and Americans spoke and those from Africa and Asia more needed to be "invited in". Elsewhere, some of us felt judged by others based on the institutions we worked for that maybe were seen as "part of the problem".
Did we come in with the mindset that our role was to harness the maximal collective power of the group? To cultivate the collective genius (scenius)? Step back to observe our thoughts and behavior, reserving judgment, challenging our mindset? Optimizing for the dynamic of the bigger whole rather than ourselves? Ultimately, be the change we want to see?
We face the same overarching challenge and tension between goals, but they manifest very differently context-to-context. We can learn from each other, but to do that we will equally need to be comfortable adapting.
It seems to me that when we zoom out fully, we have shared goals. Social infrastructure that might have the following characteristics:
There are tensions between these characteristics. Finding a way to manage these tensions is the challenge we all face no matter where we are.
Yet how we manifest this goal is different in every context. Historically, richer and extractive countries have experienced development that has been linked to the destruction of nature and global inequality. These wealthier countries need a just transition within what is now a tight ecological margin – their carbon budgets are close to depleted. Countries who have development ahead of them are trying to not repeat the ecological destruction and issues of inequality created by these richer countries.
The more you zoom in to specific communities, the more the “how” of the change differs. What we “know” in one context starts to get challenged when exploring another context. How we communicate, frame, engage has to evolve too.
Universalism can be dangerous. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals are a useful starting point, but not the be-all and end-all.
We can undoubtedly learn from each other. Yet every context will need differently adapted solutions, rather than ones off-the-shelf. We need to find ways for connective language and discourse, but we also need to sit with differences and adapt to specific contexts.
We need both technical, political solutions and cultural solutions. We need to work to bring those to the table who can create the culture for change.
We talked about three key ingredients to connect more capital to communities: 1) shared priorities, 2) creating an investable pipeline of projects, and 3) developing the enabling environment. For all of these, I see that we need cultural approaches as well as technical ones.
We talked about the need to "build the piping". There is a detachment between where funding sits and where funding is needed. We need to build the connective tissue cross-boundary. Given the contextual differences, this tissue is not just structural – it is also cultural tissue that we need.
As outlined by Cathy-Mae Karelse, we need to shift deeper mental models, we need a multi-capital approach beyond finance (culture, social, spiritual, relational and so on), and we need catalysts and ecosystem builders.
While there is space for more intellectual and technical innovation, there is a huge space to fill for soft skills, translators, facilitators, and storytellers in the transformation we seek. We will need to invest in these more intangible roles in local communities, changemaker organizations, funds, governments, in multilateral organizations. When we zoom out to the macro global scale of connecting capital to communities, this seems critical.
It would have been helpful to have more of these skills in our group.
We talked a lot about impact measurement. Not everything can be told through numbers. We are feeling, storytelling beings. Farmers may ‘just know’ whether the soil is healthy if they are working in harmony with nature. Stories from communities may act as an impact measurement. There is emerging energy to explore this method. What is a citizen's story, their feelings before and after they own their first home? Or easily access clean safe water? Eat healthy local sustainable food and support their local community in the process?
Culture can be the soil for change. This soil is made up of narratives and stories. We can cultivate that soil. We need to find connective stories, connective language, connective common ground that connects people who are operating in quite different contexts. Not necessarily the same story or language.
We need to challenge ourselves to get into depth around problems, mechanisms of change, but also iterating our way through signal from the real world.
The scale of the issues is so big that it's hard to connect this to the very tangible things on the ground. We need to find ways of zooming between all the scales and contexts and leverage people who are great at that.
Our group leaned more towards technical and mechanistic thinking – the details of the "how". Sometimes we missed the deeper "what" and "why" of what we are solving and missed addressing a deeper root cause.
To get to powerful solutions, it is helpful to spend time understanding the true dynamics of the problems. In the startup world, where there is the ability to iterate and adapt to information quickly, this is less vital. You can iterate towards the solution that works. With infrastructure like houses, water and farms – and with more complex financial instruments – it is harder to just iterate and work things out.
When we immerse more in the dynamics of the challenge and the status quo we are looking to shift, we can better get into the roots of challenges and the systemic lock-ins that prevent change. I found myself wondering in some cases if improved financial instruments are the best way to address the root cause of some of these big problems. They may be treating symptoms of problems.
When we dug into the mechanics of "how", we missed out a bit on really understanding what our theory of change or impact thesis is for a given solution. Why is this the solution to drive change? What is the intended result? What are the critical assumptions in our model that will make or break whether this will work in the way intended? We might also consider ways we can prototype and iterate to learn from real life.
Combining these different approaches can help us come up with more effective solutions.
Catalytic organizations embody our best hopes to break the reinforcing feedback loops and lock-ins to the existing degenerative system we find ourselves in.
What we need to drive change are what we might call “catalytic organizations”.
Organizations may drive both direct change (building houses) and enable wider change (creating the conditions for more houses and wider development) such as Casa Real. Elsewhere, they may act as the critical piping between sources of finance and projects. Or they may break reinforcing feedback loops that prevent change, where each vital resource is dependent on the existence of another resource. Or they may kickstart more transformative change in richer countries to widen the ‘path of progress’ which has become quite narrow. So narrow, in fact, that current innovation efforts risk merely optimizing the current degenerative extractive system rather than changing it.
We need to work out which critical catalytic role(s) are needed in each context. Then we need to get the resources (not just money) to the catalytic organizations playing these roles.
When I zoom out, I see that what Salzburg Global did was find these catalysers from across the world. Then create the environment for them to engage while guiding them through a collaborative and emergent process.
I also see that these are five ways we can enact change better, to articulate shared priorities, create and execute an investable pipeline of projects, and improve the enabling environment for funding to land impactfully. I thank Salzburg Global, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and all the fellows for the experience. And I look forward to the cross-cutting collaborations that emerge from this group: hopefully marrying structural and cultural approaches to system change.
As Co-Director of Metabolic Ventures, Murray Gray specializes in enabling early-stage entrepreneurs achieve their business and impact objectives, helping them succeed in realizing their system change vision. After tinkering in entrepreneurial endeavours in his teens, Murray started his career in finance, before spending most of his 20s in entrepreneurship within the creative industries. Upon moving into the world of sustainability and social impact, Murray developed a strong view on the role of enterprise in driving a new sustainability agenda across a variety of life cycles: from impact-focused startups to SMEs within the B Corp movement and large-scale enterprises evolving their business models. Metabolic Ventures' work focusing on enabling entrepreneurs to design and develop ventures that aim for system change. A key part of this is building the enabling environments that empower them to succeed: through finance, expertise, networks and policy.