It’s been 3 years since our first gathering, the “workshop” that sparked the Francesco Collaborative. Then, it was an experiment, a simple and spirited question inspired by Pope Francis’ invitation to build the Economy of Francesco:
What would it look like to come together with friends and colleagues for authentic discussions about faith, the enduring challenges of our world, and the inadequacy of our dominant financial paradigm?
Since then, we’ve had the privilege of accompanying over 200 investors, leaders, and entrepreneurs across 9 cohorts of our Livable Future Investing workshop. Anchored in a vision of an economy inspired by Catholic Social Teaching and ordered toward the common good, our alumni have come together to pray, rewrite their investment policy statements, creatively flow capital to places that need it most, and join together to make catalytic early commitments to visionary fund managers.
Along the way, we’ve found that aligning our investments with our faith values is deeply spiritual and relational work. We need a community rooted in a common culture of trust, expertise, and generosity.
To support your journey, we’d like to share our prayer book and highlight a few of the voices that have inspired our analysis and accompanied us along the way:
- Let Us Dream by Pope Francis
- The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism by Adrienne Buller
- The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
- Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises by Marjorie Kelley
We’re grateful for where we’ve been, and we look forward to all that is on the horizon.