Why Trust Is the Risk Mitigation Strategy and Reparations is a Way of Life
Reparations is a way of life, not just a hat you put on.
On the evening of September 2nd, RUNWAY Roots hosted a virtual salon that was, by any measure, the a bold conversation for the reparative capital movement.
Jessica Norwood, Founder and CEO of RUNWAY Roots, and Allison Thomas, a capital holder publicly reckoning with her family's history of enslavement and spending down her inheritance toward repair, sat together for an hour of honest, unscripted, deeply human conversation about what it means to move capital differently and what it demands of everyone who tries.
Here is what we heard.
The ROOTED Fund is not a theory. It is a track record.
Over the life of RUNWAY Roots — now 10 years — the organization has put out approximately $18 million. The ROOTED Fund, its third and most ambitious vehicle, is targeting $50 million in trust-based, community-underwritten capital for Black entrepreneurs across the United States. The repayment rate is 100%. The default rate is zero.
Those numbers, as Jessica noted, "directly refute the core assumption used to justify the exclusion of these communities from conventional capital for generations."
Reparative capital has three layers — and all three have to happen at once.
Jessica described the framework she has built over a decade of practice:
The first layer is personal — the work of learning and unlearning inside ourselves, unraveling the shame, blame, guilt, and grief that extraction has left in communities and individuals alike.
The second is interpersonal — how we relate to each other, the difference between transactional and transformational relationships, what it means to be in right relationship with the people and communities capital is meant to serve.
The third is systemic — the apologetic gesture made structural. Long-term, non-extractive capital. Community-led funds. Policy changes that ensure we never go back.
"That's how we get the scaled, more system strategy," Jessica said, "so that we never go back to these extractive models."
Allison Thomas offered the investor reframe that every advisor needs to hear.
Allison came to RUNWAY Roots during COVID, drawn by concern for Black Main Street businesses and the work of Resource Generation. Her entry point was philanthropic. Her evolution was instructive.
"I think of it as taking money out of my bond fund and putting it into Runway. The money is in circulation. I know I'm supporting a growing ecosystem of businesses. And you have zero defaults. To me, it's just as secure an investment — and the interest rate's not that different."
The insight is simple and devastating: patient capital deployed into reparative funds carries a risk profile comparable to municipal bonds — and produces outcomes that municipal bonds never will.
She was equally clear about why she chose to work through an intermediary rather than making direct investment decisions: "I don't want to pick the winners. I really prefer to channel my philanthropy and investment through an intermediary, because I'm not the expert."
The entrepreneurs are in on repair with RUNWAY Roots.
Jessica shared the story of the REAL People's Fund in Oakland — seven nonprofit organizations that came together because they were watching their neighborhoods lose their restaurants, their shoe cobblers, their local institutions to gentrification. RUNWAY Roots helped them build a democratically-governed fund. The entrepreneurs and organizers it supported then did something unexpected: they went to the Oakland city council and changed local tax law to stop large corporations from exploiting a loophole that was harming small businesses.
"What I understood in that," Jessica said, "is how much power comes from when you have the resources, when you have people who believe in you, when you have people who are educating you about how these legislative measures are impacting your business. And when they get motivated and they become active."
Reparations is a way of life.
When Naima McQueen asked the closing question — what would your ancestors and the generations who come after you take away from how you have chosen to move — Allison answered first.
"The phrase that's been coming up for me as we've been preparing for this is that reparations is a way of life. It's not one action, it's not one strategy. It's a way of moving in the world — always thinking about who could use that helping hand, who you want to be in relationship with."
Jessica closed with a dream.
A recurring dream from childhood, where she stood in line in heaven waiting for her job assignment and was told she would spend her life doing repair work. When the pandemic hit, the dream returned. This time, she got back in line — trying, as she put it, to negotiate a different job.
She listened to what everyone else was getting.
"It turns out that everybody got the same job. Everybody was expected to do the repair work. It didn't matter if you were born at the time the violence happened. It didn't matter if the person who harmed you could actually do the repair work. Because everybody around you was on the job for repair. Somebody might come along and do the repair work for you that was healing something in you that they didn't even cause."
"Everybody has the responsibility to do repair."
