KONDA MASON HAS LOVE CAPITAL
To impress you, I might have started with this: Konda Mason is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Grammy Award-winning music producer and former co-founder and CEO of Impact HUB Oakland. When it comes to finance and the economy, however, it is the fact that Konda has one of the most expansive, soulful and brilliant minds—which will inspire you to reframe your unconscious biases and lead you to stretch your assumptions—that makes her a true leader.
Her bio makes you want to drop the mic. She is project director of the Runway Project Oakland, a micro-lending fund for African American entrepreneurs, co-founder of The Wellbeing In Business Lab and co-founder of the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, which focuses on “Building the We Economy.” She sits on the Board of Directors of The Good Work Institute, Krista Tippett’s On Being, United Roots, and Spirit Rock Meditation Center where she is in a four-year Dharma Teacher Training with Jack Kornfield as her personal mentor. In her spare time she leads annual eco-tourism trips to the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador in order to wake people up to become active stewards of this vital earth ecosystem. She is also co-founder of Jubilee, a new business of wisdom keepers and wealth holders focused on joyfully preparing the next generation of investors to meet this moment and to defend the sacred.
Konda’s work is fuelled by a passion to witness in her lifetime a world that is environmentally regenerative, spiritually fulfilling, socially just and economically equitable. She is one of a network of leaders who can help us reclaim a sense of pride in being expansive, soulful sentient beings. We humans have very delicate nervous systems; the stories we tell ourselves become Truth. Our leaders become our ballasts, whom we strap ourselves to for good or evil. We are moving into a new era. What’s called for is to orient ourselves towards the enlightened, the compassionate and the soulful.
“We have given our power to money. And money is what we think makes us powerful. And what’s powerful is our time with each other. What’s powerful is the time that I spend with you.”
Recently Konda told me that if she were a superhero, she would definitely be the Black Panther. I, however, think she is closer to Yoda, that wise master of The Force. As a student of another Jedi master, Jack Kornfield, Konda has chosen to spend half her time in spiritual retreat and half her time in the relative world, working to inspire and guide others. This chosen path of 50/50 living in spirit and living in “doing” shocked me. Can we protect the sacred like that in such a fast paced world? Why not? Who wrote the rules for how we are supposed to live this one glorious life? We need the morally robust to help us think about inequality in the world. We need those skilled in holding sacred spaces—not those co-opted by religion or dogma—we need to recover the things that have left us out in the wilderness of our own inner lives. We need to orient towards those strong enough to be vulnerable
