Where I Went Wrong: Marjorie Kelly on Why Advancing Ethical Business Isn't Enough
October 30, 2023
11 a.m. to noon Mountain Time
Free webinar
For over 30 years, Marjorie Kelly has helped to build movements like ethical investing, corporate social responsibility (CSR), B Corps, and worker ownership. While these fields have grown, however, many of the problems they set out to fix have only gotten worse. By tucking ethical concerns into the current paradigm, she believes, well-meaning people have inadvertently reinforced that paradigm—or we’ve stayed isolated in our silos, reluctant to see ourselves as part of unified next system beyond capitalism. We haven’t been thinking big enough. We’re not thinking at the scale of the problem.
In this webinar, Kelly draws on the lessons of her career—including her mistakes—to call for a movement that refuses to take the current system for granted.
Kelly's new book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, stresses that the real problem is not a lack of alternatives, it is a system intricately designed to keep the wealthy prosperous and protected—a system biased toward wealth holders. Changing this requires having difficult conversations. But Kelly says it’s time for those conversations. Without a change of mindset, technical solutions and innovative models will never add up to the new system now necessary to our survival. And much of what we build will continue to be devoured.
Marjorie Kelly is Distinguished Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative. Her previous books include The Making of a Democratic Economy (co-authored with Ted Howard), Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, and The Divine Right of Capital. Kelly has for years been a thought leader in next generation enterprise design, employee ownership, impact investing, and the building of a community-rooted democratic economy. Previously she was a Fellow at the Tellus Institute and cofounder/president of Business Ethics magazine.
This webinar is moderated by Nathan Schneider and hosted by the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.
