Building the Infrastructure for an Equitable Economy with Paul Lovejoy, founder of Stakeholder Enterprise

Kim Allchurch Flick: Hello everyone. I’m delighted to be here with Paul Lovejoy, a friend and someone who I share a committee membership with on the Social Enterprise Alliance. Paul Lovejoy is the founder of Stakeholder Enterprise, the nation’s first community investment advisory firm.

After navigating the 2008 financial crisis and facing deep personal and professional challenges, Paul began a powerful journey of reflection in renewal. That experience shaped his commitment to building a more ethical and sustainable financial system that truly serves people and planet. So our topic today is building the infrastructure for an equitable economy.

Welcome Paul. It’s so good to see you. 

Paul Lovejoy: It’s great to be here, Kim. Thank you for the invitation and I love talking about equitable economies, 

Kim Allchurch Flick: and that’s an important. Aspect. We are recording this in January of 2026, where daily money is a big topic and a variety of perspectives, and I really appreciate you being here with the topic of e equitable economy.

And describe to us what your journey has been and what arriving to the idea of equitable economy means to you. 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah, let’s take a step back and really ask ourselves what an economy is. And that’s where my journey started in this specific how do we build infrastructure for that?

So it was the lockdowns, COVID lockdowns just happened and the guy on the TV said The economy we’re shut, the economy is shutting down. And my older son, who was eight at the time, he looked at me and he said, dad. What’s an economy And so I gave him the standard answer. Oh, it’s buyers and sellers markets, resources.

And he seemed content with the answer, it felt so much more at the time, with it just felt, and I wasn’t satisfied with that answer. I went down a Google Rabbit hole and started looking up definitions of economy. And the history of an economy. And what I’ve found was really shift my paradigm on how I looked at economies.

Humanity’s very first economy was called a foraging economy. And when I read that I was like, whoa. Okay. I am a human being and I’m forging for what? Mushrooms that don’t kill me, using a primitive weapons to hunt. I’m, and in this forging economy I’m probably starving at some time, and it made me think that I was like, oh my gosh.

I’m an animal in nature, in a foraging economy. And so that’s when it hit me. I was like, oh, our economy is a natural system. And that reframed everything how I approached and view an economy. Essentially the, when I kept going down this road, I saw that an economy is essentially resource distribution.

And then I asked, well, how does nature. Handle resource distribution, and that’s when a whole, answers started to reveal themselves. Nature works in layers. They don’t try and do everything at once like human economies do. They’re universal infrastructure.

Happens before competition. And when you look at nature, you see that every seed gets soil before competing for sunlight. Every organism gets water before competing for other resources. And so it’s allowed me to see that. Oh, okay. So there is a bigger system here and the way human beings are doing it is going against nature’s principles.

Which is the reason why we’re having all this concentration of wealth, exploitation and all these. So I came up with these five different layers. But here’s the crazy thing. The first layer wasn’t the bottom one that I, that I. Discovered and in fact, I didn’t even really understand the layers.

The, how I came into this space was I saw I thought businesses were the root problem. These corporations, they’re extractive, they’re for-profit. They have a terrible purpose. And so I went into social enterprise. I joined the Social Enterprise Alliance where, you know, you and I, Kim, we were on a committee.

And I thought, okay, if we can get companies with a different purpose, instead of the purpose being maximizing shareholder value, what if the purpose was to solve social or environmental problems? I was like, okay, this is a solution. Regenerative businesses, this is what we do.

Social enterprise. Okay, so I am all in on social enterprises, and then I see that, oh, they’re not getting funded. Oh, this is a problem. We need to fund these social enterprises. So this is when I started to get more into the investment space. And this was 2017 or so when I started getting in the investment space and 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And 

Paul Lovejoy: really understanding oh, okay. How do we fund social enterprises? And the really only way to fund social enterprises was through investment crowdfunding, because you can’t invest in a social enterprise on the stock market. It doesn’t exist. So I was like how do we fund these social enterprises?

Okay. Investment crowdfunding, it’s the only way the public can actually fund a business. That creates value. So it’s so then I was like, okay, this is great. I found a way to fund social enterprises, but then as a financial planner, I’m seeing in my inbox all of these notifications about crypto currency planning for your financial your financial advisory practice.

And I was like, crypto planning. And I started looking into crypto and I saw that Bitcoin gets better returns, just speculating. So essentially you’re putting your investment dollars in Bitcoin. And it just stays there. There’s no value that’s being created but your money is appreciating 25% a year in Bitcoin versus a productive investment in a social enterprise where you can generate 10.

15, 20% returns, you can probably not more like 10%, which is something I’m doing regularly. You can’t compete 10% with a 25% at Bitcoin. And so I was like, oh. See what you mean? 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. 

Paul Lovejoy: So there’s a different problem. It’s not just investment into social enterprises because people aren’t going to invest in social enterprises when they can.

They can just put their money in speculation. And then that’s when I really realized that’s not even the deepest problem. Our entire public market is based on investment market, is based on speculation. So consider this Kim. There is $43 trillion in retirement accounts right now. That’s all capital that is.

Speculating, it’s not being used for productive investment. Instead, when you in have invest in the stock market, you’re trading ownership papers. You’re saying, I own this company and I wanna buy this other company because I think it’ll be more valuable in the future. You’re not taking your investment dollar and saying.

Okay. Hire, 10 more people for your social enterprise so you can serve your community better. It’s not saying, okay, I’m gonna fund this community kitchen that’s going to do classes and provide all kind of value to the community. That’s a productive investment that’s not happening with 43.

Trillion dollars, and here’s the crazy thing. We’re in our poli political system, we’re arguing over how we can allocate our tax dollars. Meanwhile, the capital that we actually do have control over, we just let Wall Street decide whatever we want to do with it. That $43 trillion.

We have control over our retirement accounts, but we don’t know that we can use it for productive investment. So I was trying to bring in people into this productive investment and I realized that’s never gonna work. That’s never gonna work. What I need to do is bring the productive investment to the retirement capital.

So that’s when I, realize that there needs to be standardized reporting within investment crowdfunding. So I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself here, but essentially everything I just said in the story describes a different layer in nature. And I have for the listening audience, a complete breakdown of the framework I just talked about.

So it, it provides a visual to see what Layer does and how it affects in our economy and what’s broken about it right now. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example. At the very bottom layer is I call store of value. Okay, so in nature, this is the soil, water, air, sunlight, the foundational substrate.

This is universal access for all organisms and resources cycle back through decomposition, supply adapts to ecosystem needs. Now in our current system, we use US dollar or gold as the store of value. Now, US dollar violates conservation principles because we can print it infinitely.

There’s there’s no there’s no conservation print. It’s infinite. And that doesn’t. In nature that doesn’t exist. And the other store of value that humans have used is gold. But this violates lifecycle boundaries because of perpetual accumulation. It, you never can ha someone who has gold as the very first base layer they’re gonna get that it’s only gonna accumulate over time and create dynasties.

And so that’s the problem with the store of value. Our layer, first layer. Now in a, that seems to mean 

Kim Allchurch Flick: wow. 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. In a regenerative model, we’re talk, we need to have universal capital substrate. So a store of value with lifecycle boundaries fixed apply with dynamic adaptability.

In other words think of an island. Let’s say water is is that store of value, okay. Water. Now, on some in through earth there, there’s the same amount of water that there’s always been on planet Earth, but it changes through climate. So when it’s very cold, the water levels will decrease because it all freezes and the island all of a sudden gets more land.

Now, when the, when it changes, then and the planet heats up the water rises. And so now there is less land, but it’s still a fixed supply that’s dynamically adaptable. So I know that. It’s probably a little bit complicated, trying to say this. But essentially we need to have a store of value that mimics.

Our natural systems and we don’t have that now. I have on my own put out a proposal for a universal collateral token with 125 year lifecycle, a population responsive supply where everyone receives one token at the age of 18. So anyways that’s the infrastructure part that, that we would need.

So I know I’ve been talking for a long time here. You probably have some questions, so I’ll stop now. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I’m enthralled and I, my knowledge of economics is minuscule what I hear in the news, listening to economists speak. But what comes to mind is. The thing that I’ve heard most is if you get 10 economists in a room, you’ll get 10 different opinions and that makes it difficult to understand economics and what you’ve done is for the first time really bring some clarity to the origins.

Also what that can mean for our future if we think of economics as, dare I say it, but perhaps a force for good and. And how to think of it in those terms. So what does that look like moving forward as you’re creating this? What kind of are you, what kind of response are you getting? How far has it gone?

What, yeah, what does the journey look like? 

Paul Lovejoy: So I’ll tell you a little bit about this year. So at March of this year or the last day of February of 2025. I finished a experiment where I made one micro productive investment every day. For 366 days straight. All right. It was a this challenge, this experiment I did, and the average investment amount was about $30 a day $12,000 total.

And I wanted to show, demonstrate that productive investment can beat Wall Street, and by the end of the, year I had hundreds of investments with loans that had different terms and each platform had different ways of reporting the, these returns and terms of service. So it was impossible for me to.

Track all of these loans without manually going into a spreadsheet and adding every single payment. I went on a webinar the Crowdfunding Professional Association. They had me on a webinar to talk about this challenge. And I mentioned this and I got a email from someone who watched the webinar saying I’m having the same problem.

I have hundreds of investments. And I don’t know what to do. So we got together and we started talking about it, and over the summer we came up with an idea of what if all of these investment, these crowdfunding investment platforms, all had the same export where you can download a spreadsheet.

With all your investments, but it had the same format, the same columns, so the columns were all the same. And the payment schedule, it was all the same. How it would, and that way we could actually calculate our return and we could track our portfolio across dozens of platforms and we’re like, oh, this is a great idea.

And then at the end of the summer I met with an institutional wealth manager manages 2 billion in impact capital. And the conversation was how come, how come, institutional capital really, in this retirement capital, how come it can’t get into productive investment?

And his answer was immediate. He was like, oh, it’s standardized reporting. We can’t put money into this if we don’t know what kind of returns we’re getting and there’s no way to report it. And then I didn’t really put the pieces together. But all of a sudden that this standardized CSV down download spreadsheet was looking a lot bigger.

All of a sudden we’re like, oh. And then a few months later I met with a colleague of mine who we’re we’re judges on a live pitch show together, and he has a fund in regulation crowdfunding in but he invests just in the equity deals, meaning there’s, it’s not loans, so there’s no need to really track consistently.

And I was asking about his fund structure because I was considering starting a fund and but one with income and he said, well, it’s all about our, the standardized reporting of Form C, which all regulation crowdfunding companies need to provide data on their business, basic revenue and debt kind of stuff.

And so that was the ba and that, that’s when it clicked for me. I was like, oh, so he bases this fund on the standardized reporting of regulation crowdfunding. If I. Had a fund that standardized reporting for the the loans and the, these other investments. Then I would be able to take it to retirement capital.

So it kind, I lit. So what I did was. All of a sudden I can create a fund that retirement accounts can invest in by building rails, allowing retirement capital into productive investment markets. So I took this standard, I brought it to our professional industry a trade association, the crowdfunding Professional Association to get official backing.

They love the idea. We’re in the process of doing official backing right now. I reached out to the top four. Crowdfunding, investment crowdfunding platforms that do these types of loan type investments. 

About the, they all replied, they all answered, genuinely interested in doing this. So that’s where I’m at right now.

Building actual infrastructure to bring in retirement capital into productive markets where social enterprises can get the funding they need.

Kim Allchurch Flick: This is so exciting and it sounds like a first and a necessity for a brighter future for support of mission driven companies who are making strides in the world. So what do you see as the timeline, or what is your timeline for accessibility to this? 

Paul Lovejoy: That’s a great question. It’s building infrastructure takes time.

And I’m currently looking for partners to help me build infrastructure, my own advisory practice. I help inheritors who are struggling with or who have gone through, who have done the work. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Who 

Paul Lovejoy: want to take the inheritance that they may feel has been gained by extractive means and use it regeneratively.

And so that’s, those are the people who I am partnering with currently, to take on as advisory clients to help build some of this infrastructure. The timeline, it’s gonna take some years, but I would expect that. The standard, the CSV downloads standard can be adopted by the top four investment crowdfunding platforms.

At the end of the year official adoption and the crowdfunding platforms. Now, this is me just speculating at this point, but this is what I see. This is what I envision. And then the following year I would build up the fund based on this tracker of and the data that I get from having this, these new, spreadsheets and, so we’re looking at about, I would say, wouldn’t it be a huge stretch that in five years I could build a fund where let’s say Vanguard or State Street or BlackRock can actually be able to invest in, and those are the ones that are managing retirement accounts. They’re already doing crypto kind of stuff. I don’t see why not productive investment in social enterprises. Why not have an ETF for that, and why not be the ones that build it? I’m not gonna be able to build this alone. That’s why I’m asking for partners.

And makes sense. If anybody wants to download the asset that I’m offering, you could see maybe. You see a partnership opportunities in one of the layers. 

And I, I would love to collaborate to get this thing built. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: It sounds timely as well. We’ve heard of green funds and things of that nature.

One question I have for you also is donor advised funds, because you mentioned people who are inheriting. And I don’t understand fully how those work. But I’m curious and it seems like the potential is so great, but also the other point, which you brought up in the beginning is the need that often like small to middle sized social enterprise companies and particularly, and I’m gonna reflect on what I’ve seen in the Oregon area is those who are run by women.

Minority groups, L-G-B-T-Q are often even more underfunded than other social enterprises. That’s, and how can we make it ethical and equitable? 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. That is the ultimate question from my point of view. It’s not about fixing a broken system. It’s about building alternative infrastructures based on nature’s principles.

I love it. And that way, it can be done legally, ethically, and without confrontation. We don’t need to fight for it. We just need to build it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. And have the tracking mechanisms and the reporting 

Paul Lovejoy: we, yeah, that’s right. And those donors advise fund, they need standardized reporting too.

All of the institutional capital needs standardized reporting. And so this is, it is a big deal. The thing is that there’s no money in this. To actually build the standardized reporting. I see a future for me to build it, not just because it’s going to build rails for production, but it’ll allow me to have a fund and that’s how I can make money.

And there’s, there’s lots of layers within the layers. It’s good that we’re talking Kim, because it is hard to articulate. Something so big as an economy and so big as nature. It’s good that we’re having this conversation and, allowing, how to give this message, how do you, how do you do that?

How do you, say this message where people will get it and wanna help build. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Absolutely. And being visionary can be difficult to articulate, and I think you’re doing a really interesting and good job of it with that, those layers. But it also brings me to, Robin Wa Kim’s work and her books where she talks about extraction as being bad, but reciprocity as being good and how those economies of the First Nations peoples were.

Really equitable and good. And she has a story in her book that talks about how and when white people came in and we’re looking at how how the First Nations people did things and they say, where do you store your food? And the people said, well, we’re Hunter, we’re gatherer. I even hear this in these times in I’ve heard some some chiefs speak about.

How they’ve lived on the reservations and when they had more of, their natural land. They said, we didn’t think about storing things. He said, I if I kill an elk and my brother is picking carrots, we store it in the belly of our brother because it’s reciprocal and also about not being extractive, which really resonated with me.

A lot that there is a huge difference between reciprocity. We can take and yet be reciprocal and do things that give back to, and help make the land and other people and other species healthier with some balance. But to not store something as much as to share it because everybody thrives and it’s like storing something in the belly of your brother.

And I think what you’re talking about is. Storing money in the belly of social mission driven companies. 

Paul Lovejoy: That’s right. Yeah. You’re absolutely right, Kim. I think that’s a great way to say it. And a great framing for it. And reciprocity is cyclical, that’s nature. Yes. And indigenous tribes, first people.

That’s how their economies operated. It worked with natural principles. I think with the technology that we have today with the internet, it allows unique distribution that couldn’t possibly exist before this technology. And that’s what. An economy ultimately is, is resource distribution and having an internet that can distribute so easily.

And not just that it’s also the governance aspect of it. Those First Nations tribes, they didn’t, you said, they didn’t say, okay, we need to kill this many Elks, or like a chief said that to ha no. If one brother he needed food, they would kill. They, it was done by, living within the ecosystem, you feel the demand pulling from the ecosystem.

So you did it, it wasn’t a chief saying, okay, we need to kill three Elks this year. That’s also something that the internet is allowing, it’s allowing for decentralized cooperation where, we can put. Our money and essentially, voting with your dollars. We could vote with our dollars through these investments into social enterprises to shape how the future wants to be, and we don’t have those votes right now.

What we do is we let Wall Street dictate where all this money goes. And what does Wall Street do? They put all that money in extractive corporations. No wonder our life is like this. That’s the way, wherever we want to have our future, that’s where we need to move the money. ‘Cause when we control where the money flows, we control what gets funded, what gets built, and what thrives.

Kim Allchurch Flick: That is such a good quote. How you want to have your future is where to put the money. I’m writing that down. What? I think about the world of social enterprise and B Corps and B Lab, and a lot of focus is on local, which is super important. And yet we live in global economies, and you and I are speaking from different time zones and different states, and yet there’s a commonality here.

So in a way, local in some ways has become larger and. It’s still super personal and important. And as you see this in the future how do you see two things. One is there, there will still be people who have 4 0 1 Ks that have historically been mutual funds. If they can self-select, what could that be?

But also a lot of small to medium businesses where. It’s very local, very grassroots. People are earning, but it’s not as structured or they don’t have the 401k avenue for building wealth. And we also know that there are people who have no generational wealth. So they are looking for opportunities to begin that for their future and their family’s future.

And you mentioned also investing $30 a day. What if it was $30 a week or even $30 a month as a start, how do you see small being able to start to go down the road that you’re suggesting that’s good for their pockets, but also good for the planet and mission driven businesses. 

Paul Lovejoy: From what I’ve discovered from my own work, it’s really difficult to try and get anybody to commit to any type of investment routine.

Even a small one. It’s incredibly challenging and it’s not something that I’m gonna be focusing a lot of time on is trying to get. People to commit to investment habits. Yes, it’s so accessible. It’s never been this accessible to build wealth ethically. It’s never been with very little you $10 minimums.

I can invest $10 a week, $10 a month. And something that, like in a community solar project, in a small if you want to contribute $10 to a $30,000 small business loan for a new oven, you could do that. The loan will be 11%. Paid monthly. That’s a good, that’s a good loan to have a good it’s mutual benefit and it’s incredibly easy.

What’s difficult is doing that consistently, every week doing that. And so what’s lacking? Are auto investing mechanisms, and it’s just it requires so much effort for even a smaller person to come up with their financial plan and then to hire a financial planner that’s also expensive.

If you are a do it yourselfer, you could, you can absolutely build wealth ethically and invest in. Things that actually create value and see it. You could see I was a part of that, it’s pretty beautiful to, to see that. But it’s not easy. So that’s the real, that’s the real challenge, and that’s why I think it’s so important just to if someone’s looking at their 401k option, like, oh, you know what?

I wanna be in this. A fund that does productive investment in social enterprise, just like a box to check. That’s the only way things are gonna change. I, that’s the way I see it. Trying to change behavior. The, that’s why I was talking about, it’s not about fighting a system. It’s about building infrastructure that makes the ethical choice not only the obvious choice, but the easy one.

I love that. Yeah. It’s like, I’m not gonna try and convince you that you need to stop using plastic. Instead, I’m gonna make an investment in a company that does plant-based plastic, and they do it so good, it’s gonna be much cheaper than petroleum plastic. And then as a consumer’s like, well, I’m not gonna buy this expensive plastic.

I want the cheap plant plastic. I’m not, I didn’t have to convince that person to stop using plastic. I invested in the alternative that made it the easy choice. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, I love that. I love that. And I think we’re both seeing industries that are, and this is where I put a lot of my hope in the innovators that are doing that.

And there are options that are we have now that we didn’t have even five years ago. And there are options coming that we don’t even know about. And to that point I’ll tell you a brief story about, I decided after Costco’s my husband’s happy place, but the laundry soap for two people, five gallons or whatever it was.

But I decided I really wanna look for eco-friendly plastic free cleaning supplies and laundry. And I did an experiment where I found three companies at the time. Now there’s five or six even. That met that search requirement and I ran an experiment where every load of laundry and the trick is unscented, otherwise people will know there’s something changing.

And all right, each load was with a different brand, including the Costco one, as I was trying to empty that five gallon plastic bottle and nobody noticed ’cause it was a secret, but I was running it through for quality control. And in the end I said, okay, I’ve emptied this five gallon plastic jug, and meanwhile there’s these disks that are plant-based and the packaging has zero plastic and I can keep it in a glass jar.

Or the tin that they can provide takes up like a 10th of the space. The laundry’s just as clean because nobody said, Hey, this doesn’t look clean in six months of trial. Now I have zero plastic in cleaning and laundry because of innovators. 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And then, wow, if we could invest, which companies would we wanna invest in?

And he still goes to Costco, but there’s one, there’s a few items that don’t go in the cart, cleaning and laundry. So I think we can all do things like that, but I also think bringing it back to you and money is. I also see, like with incubators, and there’s a couple in the Northwest that are like incubators for clean tech that are coming up with some amazing things.

But these companies aren’t gonna get off the ground without capital. So when we look to the future and some of these people are. Great problem solvers. They’re doing things like making plant-based, no plastic cleaning supplies, but taking it to other products or services or industries. And how do you envision the future where your money and how do we make that connection where the money you’re talking about and the thing, ways people can work with your system to support innovation as well as existing.

Good companies so more and more of us can make a switch. ’cause the other thing I noticed was the cost differential. It’s about the same. I didn’t spend a whole bunch more, maybe a little bit, but not a lot more to transition to get the same result. 

Paul Lovejoy: It sounded like that company needs to get more funding for marketing so they can get bigger, we’re talking about the same price, same everything.

Consumers will pay a little bit more for an ethical choice. But it’s only it. You’re not gonna get widespread adoption unless you have really good marketing. And indeed, you need investment. To get marketing and and I see that all the time in these small business capital markets I’m in.

The ones that get the most funding actually have the the most marketing behind them as well. Whether it’s a direct outreach marketing, but it’s, it takes marketing to get funding. So that’s, that is one thing that’s gonna need to happen is a simple, well, you’re right. It, it comes down to capital getting that.

And from what I see, it’s a, the retirement capital 43 trillion. I mean, a 1 trillion is a thousand billion, and a billion is so much, it’s so crazy how much money that is. If you really think about it, if we only had 1 trillion outta that 43 trillion. What kind of land, how different would our landscape be?

Investment landscape would be, businesses getting funded. It would be a night and day difference. And. And for me, I, I know I do want to a address and I you kind of brought it up a little bit. The suffering that people are going through, there’s real suffering that’s happening right now because of the economic injustice that’s playing out.

Sure. And I have compassion for the people that weren’t born into a situation where they can, they have the same opportunities for economic growth. And I have compassion for the people that lived in the past that was even worse than what it was today. Imagine being living in a futile system, and you’re a surf working the land.

I mean, that was awful. And I have compassion for the people in the future that will suffer because. It’s not gonna change quickly. This is gonna take time. It’s gonna take building, it’s gonna take yes, intentionality to really make it. And it’s gonna take a collaboration of people that don’t necessarily agree with each other.

And I think that’s also gonna take some forgiveness and looking at a big picture of of modeling successful stories. I think, and that’s why I think it’s important that we work with the Social Enterprise Alliance because these are organizations that do exactly that.

It collaborates it, it may not be the quick fix that everybody wants, but it’s how we. Come together and use our collective intelligence to solve problems. So we alleviate suffering. So there’ll be just continuing this arc of less suffering. I think we can accelerate it greatly by switching simply from speculative investing into productive investing.

Just because all that money is literally doing nothing, it’s not. Helping our economy at all. If it is, it’s only helping an elite part of it. And, they say we’ll trickle it down, but that never happens, that’s a myth. It’s more about being a grassroots ground up and creating the conditions for change to happen.

I think if we want to have. Economic equality and equitable. It starts with that first layer. It starts where everyone has a universal access to capital. Some sort of digital token that we all can use as collateral to start a business, to to buy a first home. We need to have that ’cause that’s how nature works.

We all need to have that starting point. Not, I’m not arguing for equal outcomes, equal starting points. And I think that first step to getting that is this digital currency, it’s not a currency. It’s a digital store of value where we can build fair distribution currencies on top of it. I know I’m kind of getting lost into a different thing, but I think we need to start where at the very beginning, yes.

We all need to have access to capital. Why not make it universal? That’s what nature does. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And why not make it purposeful? Like purposeful? Yes. And what a beautiful thing to think about. As you talk, I think of some things I’m optimistic about and that is like moves by for instance, the state of New Mexico to give universal childcare to everyone in the state at no cost and new.

Newborns get a certain amount of money. Wouldn’t it be great if some of those things were nationalized, that it gives a place for money to sit and grow and people to think about future use of that, future impact of that money, how to, and hopefully along the way. And I’d really like to see this is more economic and like really grassroots down to earth.

Savings education, starting with kids. 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And play with it. Gamify it. But there are so many people who don’t understand the value of saving. Not because it’s their fault, but because the seed’s not been planted and they’re not able to see that. And, and lucky people that even though I was in corporate life and I.

It burnt me out and there were goods and bads. Having a 401k is a really remarkable thing, and 

Paul Lovejoy: yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And there, but now I’m looking back at it and saying, but it was all mutual funds and I tried to choose wisely for the planet, but there weren’t that many options. If I could go back and do that now and have a 401k, I would be like right down the road with you and say, okay, how can I put my money into something that’s gonna be productive and do some good for the innovators and the social enterprise companies at the same time?

And a lot of people do good work and have no vehicle like that for savings, so they have to be more independent. So I think what I’m optimistic about is as you build this, that hopefully it will create a vehicle and a structure for people to think about it that way. 

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: And but also for those businesses to receive.

Paul Lovejoy: Yeah. To 

Kim Allchurch Flick: give, but also receive. And I do believe that’s the genius of what you’re bringing up. 

Paul Lovejoy: Oh, thanks Kim. I appreciate that. I love doing this. I, it’s something that makes me feel good. I am excited to wake up in the day to work on these types of projects and. I think what would help a lot of people is to give yourself some compassion when it comes to just, whatever you’re doing.

If you like Kim, you know you had mutual funds and you maybe feel a little guilty. You didn’t create the system, this is what you were told, that this is responsible financial practice to have a 401k. Nobody told you that. That’s, that, that’s gonna be in speculation. It’s not gonna be in productive investment.

And just nobody ever taught these the people about financial literacy, as you were, you’re saying it’s the same thing. So we need to have compassion for that. And if we look and we compare it back to the first people, indigenous folks, well, saving up or, financial literacy, that’s like hunting and gathering skills for modern people.

And in the indigenous, you had the community. They all taught the next generation how to do that. No one’s teaching this generation because this is all brand new. All of this is all new. An economy, and I mean if you look at it historically and how long humans have survived, it’s a historical aberration, this mainstream kind of finance concept.

Working with nature that is. That’s normal if you look in a historical context. And yeah, we’ve, we stepped away from that nature. But I think there, you’re right, Kim, there is a there is a real sense of change that’s happening and awakening of like, oh my gosh, we are living against. Na nature’s principles and the pollution and climate change and people get it.

And so that’s brings me hope that yes, there is this change. And I have compassion. The, the world still does, being from the United States, oh, you’re an American, you’re responsible for this. I give my comp, I give myself compassion when someone says that to me. I’m not responsible for that.

Okay. I’m doing the best I can. I vote, I do what I can. But I don’t have to feel bad for what America does and because that’s just gonna take up my mental bandwidth when I could be thinking about building infrastructure instead. We don’t want to get sucked into these vortexes of despair or get, oh, what did Trump say?

That takes away precious mental bandwidth that I would, I don’t think is helpful or healthy for anyone to be going down those rabbit holes. Trying to hold someone accountable. Here’s how you hold someone accountable and validate their legacy by being the change you wish to see in the world.

Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh my goodness. Yes. Thank you for that. And with that also, what makes you optimistic? 

Paul Lovejoy: Well, just seeing Kim, I am being in these small business and startup productive markets. I am literally. Looking at the hopes and visions of dreams of other human beings every day, what, how they envision the future and when people are in that kind of creative mindset.

It’s so hopeful. I see a world where there is no more fossil fuels because of this technology. And it’s very hopeful to be a part of and it makes me also realize how many. Good people are working on this and there isn’t really one person saying, Hey, we need to fix the world.

It’s everyone contributing, doing their own part. You’re doing your part with this podcast. It’s so cool to see, like when you see like everyone independently deciding. We’re gonna build this. And it’s these moments of clarity that we have where we’re no longer stuck into this kind of conflict and blame and like, oh my gosh, we need to hold these people accountable.

When we have these moment of clarity where we’re like building, that’s when we come up with these ideas to, to be helpful to create the next product that’s going to replace plastic or what, whatever you ha

Something that will eventually happen. Eventually there’s gonna be a free energy.

I don’t think that’s, and if it’s only when, if you see what they’re doing with cold fusion, what I’m seeing, in these investment markets, it’s my I don’t see it as a big shock that we’re, the planet could have free energy 50 years from now. The landscape of reality I don’t think.

I think we’re so in this moment where it’s so much transition and change happening that it’s really weighing down on people. And I think it’s important for you and I to say there is hope. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I agree. And I’m gonna bring it also back to a statistic that you brought up in the beginning. And for me it, one of ’em comes from Nielsen is.

It was around 2014 even that they said that two thirds of consumers globally are willing to pay more for products and services when they know a company has good values and sometimes we don’t even need to pay more. Yeah. And with millennials it was 73% and then you brought up marketing and that’s always been the dilemma that I wanna work in and help companies is.

As a company, your customers are in that two thirds, whether you’re B2B or B2C, they’re out there. How do you make that straight line between two points and it’s marketing and it’s benefit reports and it’s being authentic to your claims and being clear about that? It really helps, and certifications and verifications help as a directory.

As another search part, but even without that, we’ve gotta get the messages out. So I love what you said about that, and this whole thing is so future forward that it gives me optimism. And I do see places where people really are working toward the end that you’re talking about. There’s the innovators, there’s.

More and more investors. And the other thing is the nod to the Social Enterprise Alliance, which we are a part of. And what is also exciting about them is the education that SEA puts out. It’s social enterprise alliance.org, but there are coffee chats and webinars and blogs, but also the membership that grows a community that is talking about these things.

So we also start to create a more circular communication system, hopefully. And if people, they say people need to hear things seven or eight times to really remember and take action now. Let’s keep talking. 

Paul Lovejoy: Let’s keep talking. I agree. Yeah. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I think this is delightful. Is there anything else you’d like to add in addition to please tell people your website.

And how you Yeah, you 

Paul Lovejoy: can learn more@stakeholderenterprise.com. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn where I’m very active. Yes, you are. It’s LinkedIn act slash Paul Lovejoy. And those are probably the two best places to. Interact or get to know me better. You can also just email me.

I’m open. It’s Paul dot lovejoy@stakeholderenterprise.com. You want to, you collaborate on one of these infrastructure projects. Let’s do it. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: Absolutely. And for listeners, everything is also in the show notes and the download. And now we come to our final question, and this is the random question about if you could have dinner with anyone living or deceased up to a table of four.

It could be one person, two people, or three people. Who would that person or they be and why? 

Paul Lovejoy: Like the person who I model myself after this may seem odd is Gandhi. Because here you have this slight, tiny little fellow in some robes and he has the ability to get entire empires to listen to him 

and 

he was able to do that.

Not with protesting. He didn’t, he wasn’t a protestor. He was an economic systems thinker. When he saw what was happening with India, he just said, Hey, let’s not buy clothes from the Empire. Let’s make our own clothes. Let’s be self-sufficient. This is the ultimate way of resistance is self-sufficiency.

And what I, this is why I would love to talk to Gandhi about his self-sufficiency, because that’s what I’m modeling. What I’m trying to do is build an alternative. This is self-sufficiency. So we don’t, right now, we’re dependent on the extractive system for our survival. We’re dependent on that.

And if we need, we want to escape, we need to be self-sufficient on regenerative economy. So I would love to talk to Gandhi about like, Hey, how can we do some of this also? But at the same time I would wanna know. More about digital currency and and crypto. So I would love to be able to talk to Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous person who wrote the Bitcoin white paper.

Nobody knows who he is. But I would love to like, who is this guy? Because when you read his white paper, it is very different than what. Bitcoin actually became, so it’s very, oh yeah, it’s very different. So I would love to, to really get to know more Satoshi Nakamoto or whatever his real name, and I’m sure there are others, but I think those are the two people who I would wanna talk to where philosophy meets technology.

‘Cause that’s where I feel like I’m, I really love the to be is where philosophy intersects with technology and finance. 

Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that and I think that’s very future forward, but yet resonates with the past, and that’s, there’s some wisdom in that. I appreciate this so much. Thank you Paul Lovejoy for being here.

Everyone. Thanks for listening. Signing off and wishing you well. Thank you.