Reflections on perspective, power, and place from our conversation with Joanna Kuang
This week's article is a summary of takeaways and further reflection of our conversation with Joanna Kuang on perspective, power, and place, and the elements that create complexity and opportunity with them.
Last week WERKIN hosted an interview with Joanna Kuang, VP of Product Development and Impact at Illumen Capital. The discussion was wide ranging and covered some of the leaps Joanna made in her career, from working at a Freedom School in the Deep South of the US to then moving to asset management, a nonprofit, and now working in impact investing at a fund of funds. From our conversation, there were a few insights from Joanna’s journey that provide opportunity for further reflection in our personal and professional journeys
The value of seeing an issue from several perspectives
Joanna shared how she did not feel as aligned to her work and work culture early on and realized that was something she had the privilege to change. Similarly, as she reflected on meaningful experiences around ‘impact’, such as working for a Freedom School with a limited budget, she was drawn to what the school was able to achieve with that money and she had exposure into the challenges that lack of funds created. When she left impact investing to go to the non-profit space understanding pay for performance with the government, she learned about the dynamics of government funding. She saw how the same organizations get funding each year regardless of outcomes and how ‘breaking into’ some of those established funding streams can be quite challenging. These experiences helped her crystallize the importance of controlling capital flows and led her to impact investing at a fund-of-funds, where she can ensure the funds that her firm invests in are committed to diverse, inclusive, and equitable practices as they fund entrepreneurs. That isn’t to say that work at every step of the funding process isn’t important both in private and public sectors, but that these different experiences helped Joanna understand where she wanted to focus. In each of these roles, Joanna ‘led from where she stood’ and then moved to stand somewhere slightly differently, getting a new understanding of the challenges in this space.
How to navigate different stage gates of power
The conversation with Joanna alluded to power in different forms - what institutions have power, such as venture capital firms, private equity, or government, forms of power, like capital. These institutions that serve as the stage-gates of power are made up of individuals, many of whom are older, straight, white men. Joanna shared her perspective as an Asian-American woman about how she coaches and brings people who are very different from her along in their understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the importance of thinking about all three when investing in ideas, communities, and entrepreneurs. She described her role as bridging a cultural gap, being able to fluidly transition between the types of language and cultural cornerstones typical of a board room versus of the classroom in Mississippi. It’s not that Joanna changes who she is in this type of situation, but that she has and can deftly adapt to whatever a situation calls for. While I wish there was more diversified representation in the echelons of ‘power’, knowing people like Joanna are working from within to dismantle the status quo gives me hope.
Balancing the tension between knowing a community and scaling a solution
The concept of place-based work came up in the conversation. Many social impact initiatives are focused on scaling a solution that can be as widely accepted as possible, without considering how some change requires really listening to, understanding, and tailoring a solution to a local community. There are examples of this, like the George Kaiser foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is focused on Oklahoma and often hires people from the area and serves the local area. There is another tension balancing new, fresh ideas and perspective with the local knowledge, relationships, and credibility of being from a place. Zooming out, these types of social impact efforts aren’t situations that have a clear cut ‘best approach’, but in a world in which organizations are ditching a traditional headquarters in favor of remote work, it’s good to check that assumption from time to time and ensure that the community being served is represented in some way in the organization and leadership itself.
The conversation with Joanna brought to light many of these topics that create even more questions to ask ourselves as we go about our jobs and ambitions. What are we working towards, and how can we look at that problem with a new, fresh perspective? Who has the ‘power’ in a situation and how can others gain access to it? And what assumptions do we operate with that we should at least be aware of, or think to challenge? For those of us who see our work as fitting into our own personal ‘theory of change’ or creating some type of positive impact, these are important questions to continue to ask ourselves and reflect upon.
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
