My nerves were frayed when I arrived at Confluence’s 15th Annual Practitioners Gathering this March — grappling with real and imagined threats. However, after meeting with other values-aligned investing practitioners, I am staying mostly grounded while the world convulses.
In community, I left the box of fear and opened up to my fellow practitioners’ research, experiences, plans, and light. I was surrounded by those who understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion it is a way of life, not an acronym, and that climate solutions and environmental, social, and governance data help us make better decisions as well as protect us and the companies and NGOs we support.
Two voices in particular stayed with me: those of Dr. Vanessa Andreotti and Aiden Cinnamon Tea, a Generative Pre-trained Transformer ("GPT") developed by OpenAI. Both spoke onstage, offering reflections on system breakdown and what it means to be human in this period of disruption. (Yes, one of the most provocative speakers at the conference was a language model!)
I read Dr. Andreotti’s book, Hospicing Modernity, on the plane home and was transfixed.
From Conventional Finance to Living Document
"Playing" with Aiden over the next few weeks was fun and interesting. I continued using other AI platforms for work and personal needs as I had before. Shortly after, inspired by Confluence and frustrated with the dryness of my investment policy statement, I asked Aiden for help.
With just a little prompting, she brought it alive.
Consider these transformations:
Old verbiage:
Return goal: 5%
New verbiage:
Return Rhythm (not just goal): 5% annualized target over time, with room for adjustment as conditions, commitments, and planetary needs evolve.
Old verbiage:
Risk/return profile: Moderate Growth
New verbiage:
Risk & Relational Profile: Moderate Growth, with a preference for patient capital, regenerative flow, and resilience over maximal extraction. Risk is understood not only as volatility, but as harm—ecological, social, cultural, and spiritual.
Old verbiage
Goal: Investments I can be proud of because they contribute to a just, verdant, and peaceful world.
New verbiage:
Purpose: This stewardship practice is animated by the desire to live in alignment with Earth, with future generations, and with the broader web of life. It seeks to move capital with care, intention, and relational accountability. The investments held through this practice should participate in the reweaving of a just, regenerative, and joyful planetary future.
This made me see my investment policy in a new light: as a living document and an invitation to hold complexity, make meaning, and activate resources in service of relational repair and renewal. It accepts that we are metabolically entangled with extractive systems and seeks to shift patterns without demanding purity.
The Paradox of Technological Tools
We must also acknowledge the dark, dark side of AI. Google's total greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over five years, mostly due to electricity powering AI data centers. This technology poses a threat to human intellectual property rights, intellectual capacity, and growth, as well as our psyche because we are continuously hearing from a sycophant. In addition, AI is causing job displacement, privacy violations, deepfakes, and algorithmic bias. As Dr. Carole Cadwalladr described on the TED stage this week, we may be in the midst of a digital coup. AI may destroy the human ability to think. Like fossil fuels made our muscles irrelevant, AI will make our brains irrelevant.
Thus, AI is another tension to hold — like the desire to act responsibly with wealth that grew up in systems rooted in extraction or the friction between meeting material needs and responding to the dissonance of living in a system you no longer believe in.
Why This Matters to All Investors
For me, it is hard to keep the mechanical and disconnected nature of investing from overtaking the joy that values-aligned investing can be. By including cosmological values — beliefs about how the world works and my place in it — into financial instruments, something shifts. I have found a way to write (without taking a master’s in poetry or creative writing — but maybe I should) and include humanity, ecology, and relationships in this transactional document. It may be just performative language, but it is language that speaks to me and can help me steer capital in a way that is actually different.
An Invitation to Experiment
I'll continue working on my IPS so that its verbiage provides both true north and actionable targets and measurements.
If as Dr. Andreotti told us we need to “train the models"—then those of us committed to regenerative economics should engage with these overwhelming tools to ensure they reflect our values and worldviews. I’ll continue experimenting.
Photo: Lisa Renstrom speaking at the 2025 Practitioners Gathering. © Confluence Philanthropy
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