In Conversation at SOCAP25: The State of Reparative Capital
As day two of SOCAP25 wound down, the real conversations were just getting started.
At B Restaurant and Bar in San Francisco, SOCAP25 attendees, speakers, and council members gathered for a relaxed happy hour that preceded The State of Reparative Capital, a conversation with Jessica Norwood of RUNWAY Roots and author of Believe-In-You Money, and Vanessa Roanhorse of Roanhorse Consulting, moderated by Edgar Villanueva of the Decolonizing Wealth Project.
It wasn’t a panel in the traditional sense. It was an evening of remembering, reckoning, and reimagining how we move money, and more importantly, how we move care. Because as one person put it that night, “How we move money reflects how we move care.”
The event offered space for real talk and honest reflection. People came to dig deeper into themes that shaped this year’s conference of transforming global finance, like “Justice and Economic Prosperity for All” and “Catalytic Capital.”
And right now, when the political tides are denouncing the work of DEI, when philanthropy is quietly walking back its commitments to racial repair, and when too many of our institutions are choosing comfort over courage—conversations like this are not just important. They’re essential.
Reparative Capital Is a Reorientation of Values
Jessica Norwood reminded us that evening that reparative is not just another word to add to the economic buzzword bingo. It’s not interchangeable with “restorative” or “regenerative.” Reparative Capital demands something deeper and far more personal.
As she shared that evening, there are three ways to understand Reparative Capital:
It centers people—not capital, not frameworks, not processes.
It requires repair at every level: within ourselves, in our relationships, and across systems.
It demands action. Reparative isn’t a posture—it’s a practice. You must show that you’re moving in a reparative way, in every way you move.
In their NPQ article What is Reparative Capital and Why Does it Matter?, Jessica, Vanessa and dana write, “What makes reparative capital distinct is that it’s not just a redistribution of money—it’s a reorientation of values.” It’s not about charity, and it’s not even about generosity. It’s a spiritual, cultural, and material commitment to repair what has been broken. To heal the harm that centuries of extraction, colonization, and racial capitalism have left inflicted.
It asks us to look in the mirror and say: What am I repairing through my work? Through my wealth? Through my presence in community?
That evening, Vanessa Roanhorse reminded us that repair is not new. For Indigenous communities, repair has always been the way.
“We had repair before we had to repair,” she said.
Vanessa spoke about her Diné/Navajo upbringing—how each morning began by greeting the sun, the land, the animals, and the people. That daily act of reverence, of naming connection, of remembering belonging, is itself an act of repair. She reminded us that we are never separate from one another or from the world around us, and that disconnection is the true wound we must heal.
In reimagining finance through a reparative lens, Vanessa has been flipping the script on what lenders call the “five C’s of credit risk.” Instead, she invites us to consider the five R’s of Rematriation—relational, rooted, restorative, regenerative, and revolutionary.
It’s a radical reframing that centers life, relationships, and Indigenous wisdom.
Grief as the Gateway to Healing
When Jessica Norwood spoke about her vision for the future, she actually didn’t start with reparative capital. She started with grief.
“We need to get intimate with grief,” she said. “What we’re running away from is grief. We are in a spiritual famine.”
The crowd fell silent at those words. Because we know it’s true. We’ve been taught to talk about systems, about data, about markets, but rarely about loss. Rarely about the aching human cost of disconnection. But Jessica reminded us that grieving and processing are the first steps in healing. “The money won’t move if the heart doesn’t move.”
And when it does move—when we allow our resources to reflect our values, when we let our money be our demonstration of power—then we begin to see glimpses of another world. One where wealth is not hoarded but shared, not extracted but circulated, not used to dominate but to heal and repair.
Because, as Vanessa reminded us, “This isn’t just about Black or Indigenous communities. It’s about all of us.”
A Moment of Reckoning and Renewal
The sentiment shared by all of the speakers in the room that night was that if you are not already doing the work of repair—in yourself, in your business, in your institution—you are already out of date.
Reparative Capital is not a trend. It is the future of finance, if there is to be a future at all. It calls on us to align our internal work with our external practices, to turn our values into action, and to remember that liberation is embodied, relational, and urgent.
