What kind of world are we building through the way we move money?

It’s a question that gets at the heart of everything. Because unless we finance the world we want, we’re unlikely to get it. 

This week Nathan is joined by Alexander “Brave Journey” Sterling. He is Co-Founder and CEO of Turtle Island Community Capital, a financial service organization working to build the monetary infrastructure for Indigenous communities to have greater agency over their own capital, rather than simply greater access to existing financial systems. 

Alexander argues that capital is infrastructure. Communities need more than money: they need trust, relationships, knowledge, technical assistance, institutions, and long-term support that allow capital to actually work. 

The conversation moves from fundraising and storytelling into much bigger questions about power, risk, philanthropy, Indigenous economic sovereignty, ecological stewardship, and what it means to finance a future that does not yet fully exist.

The conversation also examines why storytelling matters so much in fundraising. Alexander argues that what moves people is often not another quantitative metric but a story about how something became possible. Changing the stories funders encounter about Indigenous communities can therefore change not only perceptions, but where capital flows.

Alexander “Brave Journey” Sterling is Co-Founder and CEO of Turtle Island Community Capital, a Native-led financial institution building the capital infrastructure Indigenous communities need to shape their own futures. His work sits at the intersection of impact investing, community development, and national field building, advancing models that move power, resources, and decision-making closer to communities.

Alexander works across movements to strengthen relationships among investors, funders, CDFIs, and community leaders, championing a more relational and regenerative financial system rooted in sovereignty, reciprocity, shared prosperity, and long-term community resilience.

Links

Website: turtleislandcommunitycapital.org
LinkedIn: Turtle Island Community Capital
Instagram: @Turtleislandcc
Threads: @Turtleislandcc
Facebook: Turtle Island Community Capital

What if business wasn't primarily designed to maximize value for shareholders, but to help people, communities, and the planet flourish? Wild idea, right? But maybe it’s possible? 

In this conversation, Abraham Chen, Executive Director of B Local San Diego, makes the case for rethinking the role of business in our society, and for questioning the economic assumptions we've come to treat as inevitable.

Abraham explains how the B Corp movement challenges shareholder capitalism by instead prioritizing how businesses treat workers, communities, customers, governance, and the planet. But he is also clear about B Corp's limitations. Certification isn't a silver bullet, and even mission-driven companies can eventually be pulled toward the pressures of the existing financial system. That leads to a deeper question: who owns a company, who controls its governance, and how can a business protect its purpose for generations?

Abraham describes B Corp as “the doula for the next economy”—a transitional movement helping people experiment with structures that could eventually produce a more regenerative and equitable economic system. We explore examples including Patagonia, Tony's Chocolonely, Mondragón's worker-owned cooperative system in northern Spain, and the emerging world of AI governance. 

The conversation ultimately becomes aspirational too. We all have a limited amount of time on this planet. How do we want to spend it?

Abraham Chen is the Executive Director of B Local San Diego, a 501(c)(3) focused on economic systems change through the B Corp movement. His work centers on redefining business as a force for good and helping companies move toward models that benefit workers, communities, and the planet alongside financial stakeholders.

Connect with Abraham

Website: www.blocalsandiego.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abraham-chen/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blocalsandiego/

Company LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/b-local-san-diego

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/blocalsandiego

What does it actually mean for someone to belong?

For Daniel Aguirre, founder of Pueblo Collab, the answer goes beyond a workplace saying it values inclusion or creating a “sense of belonging.” Real belonging means not having to wonder whether you belong at all.

In this conversation, Daniel and Nathan explore what happens when organizations take an honest look at the difference between how they imagine their culture and how that culture is actually experienced by the people inside it. They talk about why some so-called diversity problems may really be problems of leadership and accountability; and why meaningful change often requires slowing down long enough to listen.

Daniel and Nathan also discuss power, disruption, leadership, mistakes, and the skills required to create change. Daniel argues that leadership and accountability are not traits some people are simply born with. They are skills—and people need room to stumble, learn, recognize harm, and actually change their behavior.

Daniel’s ultimate vision is a world where people can exist in their neighborhoods without worrying about whether the air, water, or environment is harming them—and where the next generation can imagine a hopeful, joyful future.

Daniel Aguirre (el/he) is a community-engagement and relationship-building strategist, organizational-change practitioner, and founder of Pueblo Collab. Through Pueblo, he helps organizations build genuinely inclusive cultures and authentic relationships with the communities they seek to partner with. His work focuses on the relational side of change: facilitating honest conversations about bias and equity and grounding partnerships in care, effective listening, reciprocity, and demonstrable accountability. He works across grassroots, science, research, and institutional settings, approaching inclusion as an ongoing practice rather than a box to check.

Website: pueblocollab.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/daniel101

Email: [email protected]

EPISODE SUMMARY

Lindsay LaShell calls herself a ‘doula for the matriarchal economy’ — helping purpose-driven entrepreneurs move away from top-down, patriarchal, and extractive business practices into ones that are more equitable, regenerative, and abundant. 

In this conversation, Lindsay and Nathan trace the difference between patriarchal and matriarchal values and get concrete on what this might look like when applied to business. This includes compensation models built on shared profit negotiation, a delegation framework built around clear "asker/doer" roles, and an honest look at why so many well-intentioned leaders are quietly afraid of power itself.

The conversation explores challenges and opportunities when it comes to efficiency, trust, idealism, and accountability. Toward the end, the conversation opens into Lindsay's other project, Buffalo Collective, and the emerging science of epigenetics: the idea that trauma can be inherited biologically.

This is a valuable conversation for anyone who feels like the business practices they inherited and find to be most prevalent in society just don’t quite make sense, and they are looking for affirmation that maybe a different way of approaching business might be worth considering. 

ABOUT LINDSAY LASHELL

Lindsay LaShell's work explores what happens when business, finance, and leadership are rebuilt from relationship rather than extraction. After years inside impact finance and purpose-driven entrepreneurship, she began questioning systems built on scarcity, ownership, and performance — and searching for models grounded instead in regeneration, reciprocity, and human integration. Through ventures including Buffalo Collective, Lindsay is building new approaches to community, leadership, and regenerative finance that challenge the separation between who people are and how they lead.

LINKS

• Substack (MBA for the Matriarchy): https://mbaforthematriarchy.substack.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsaylashell/
• BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/lindsaydayton.bsky.social
• Buffalo Collective: https://buffalocollective.co

What if justice isn't what happens after someone is harmed—but what we build to prevent the harm in the first place?

This is the question at the heart of the conversation with civil rights attorney Rebecca Young. 

She has spent approximately two decades practicing law, much of it in civil rights. She's also a former U.S. Army soldier, writer, and speaker whose talk Crayons Before Constitutions: Because Real Justice Doesn't Color Inside the Lines challenges some of our most basic assumptions about justice and the systems we've created to deliver it.

Rebecca argues that systems naturally optimize for efficiency. They categorize people, assign roles, eliminate friction, and remove unnecessary connections. That's often exactly what makes them function. But some of the things that look inefficient from a system's perspective may be precisely where creativity, connection, and possibility emerge.

Rebecca advocates for proactive justice and the conversation explores what that might mean for community care, workplace policies, politics, technology, AI, local businesses, the ways we value different kinds of work, and more.

The conversation isn't an argument against systems, technology, work, or ambition. It's an invitation to notice what they're costing us—and to remain human enough to challenge them when necessary.

Because perhaps building a braver new world doesn't require everyone to make the same contribution. It requires enough of us, working from different places, to keep pushing in the same direction.

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccayoung52/

Talk:
Crayons Before Constitutions: Because Real Justice Doesn't Color Inside the Lines

About the Guest

Rebecca Young has spent much of her life serving and defending the institutions that shape our society.

As a soldier and later as a civil rights attorney, she dedicated more than two decades to protecting the principles of justice, equality, and democracy. She believes that the most transformative ideas often come from those willing to challenge convention, question assumptions, and color outside the lines.

Through her speaking and advocacy, Rebecca inspires audiences to embrace creativity as a force for social change and reminds us that a better future is something we create together.

What happens when a skeptic sits down with an energy healer—and instead of trying to prove or disprove the practice, they start asking what might be underneath it?

Alexis Piotrowski is an energy healing practitioner whose work focuses on helping people reconnect with themselves, their bodies, their awareness, and the world around them. In this conversation, Nathan expresses his skepticism but also asks his own questions surrounding energy work: What exactly is the “energy”? How do you know what's happening? Where does intuition end and projection begin? And what separates a responsible practitioner from someone who simply adopts the label of healer?

Alexis's answers lead somewhere more complicated than a simple argument for or against energy healing. She also argues that people can learn to notice patterns in their own bodies and behavior—and that this awareness can become a powerful part of changing those patterns.

The conversation eventually moves into entrepreneurship and the pressure to turn a calling into a full-time business. Alexis and Nathan discuss the privilege that comes with having money and resources to experiment, and the strange cultural expectation that a “real” entrepreneur should only do one thing. Alexis makes the case for what she calls a multidimensional hustle—building something meaningful while allowing yourself to have other jobs, identities, and sources of income.

This conversation is ultimately about a question much larger than any particular modality: How much more agency might we have over our lives if we learned to pay closer attention to ourselves? That goes for our spiritual and emotional selves, as well as our financial and professional selves. 

Alexis Piotrowski is an energy healing practitioner whose work focuses on helping people reconnect with themselves, their awareness, and their environment. She works with people navigating physical, emotional, and major life transitions, and describes her approach as grounded and accessible even when the subject matter can feel mystical or “far out there.”

Alexis is also a certified massage therapist and previously worked in high-stress hospitality environments. Her path into energy work developed through meditation, Kundalini yoga, psychedelic experiences, massage work, and a growing awareness of what she describes as energetic patterns in the body.

Her goal is not to make clients dependent on her, but to help them develop greater awareness and agency in their own lives.

Connect with Alexis:

Website: Thousand Hand Healing
Instagram: @alexisenergyhealing
YouTube: @alexisenergyhealing

Publication note: Health-related outcomes discussed in the episode are Alexis's descriptions of her clients' experiences and her interpretation of her work; they should not be presented as established medical claims.

The old media system is breaking apart. Newspapers and magazines have shrunk, audiences increasingly get their news from social feeds and video, and anyone with a phone can become a publisher. That democratization has opened space for voices and perspectives that traditional institutions often ignored. But what happens when the institutions disappear and every individual is left to build their own audience, verify their own information, and navigate their own personalized reality?

In this episode of Braver New Worlds, Nathan talks with journalist, writer, editor, professor, and content strategist Jackie Bryant about what we have gained—and what we may be losing—as media becomes increasingly fragmented. Jackie makes the case that independent media is a vital check on legacy institutions, but warns against treating individual creators as a complete replacement for journalism’s editorial structures, institutional knowledge, fact-checking, and economic support.

The conversation moves from the history of San Diego’s media ecosystem and the literal origins of the “soapbox” to the collapse of monoculture, algorithmic feeds, media literacy, the economics of journalism, and the difficult future facing young reporters. Jackie shares what she sees among her journalism students, why being a creator often means becoming your own editor, producer, marketer, administrator, and public punching bag, and why the promise of independent media can become another burden for working-class media workers.

About Jackie Bryant

Jackie Bryant is a journalist, writer, editor, professor, and content strategist based in San Diego. Her journalism focuses heavily on cannabis business and culture while also spanning travel, food, wine, spirits, arts and culture, and organized labor. She is a content director and editor for Leaf Magazines, works with brands on fractional content strategy and copywriting, and teaches in the Journalism and Media Studies department at San Diego State University. She also writes Cannabitch, a newsletter about cannabis culture, and co-hosts the Happy Half Hour podcast with Troy Johnson at San Diego Magazine.

Find Jackie

Instagram: @jacqbry

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jacquelineannebryant

Threads: @jacqbry

Bluesky: @jacqbryant

Newsletter: cannabitch.substack.com

Website: jackiebryantwriting.com

Happy Half Hour: sandiegomagazine.com/listen/happy-half-hour-podcast/

Puff Puff Press: puffpuffpresspodcast.com

What separates an idea from a successful business?

For entrepreneur and inventor Nichole MacDonald, the answer isn't creativity—it's validation, community, and trust.

Nichole is the founder of Sash, a hands-free bag company that grew from handmade backyard prototypes into a nationally recognized brand with one of the most engaged customer communities in consumer products. But behind that success story lies a much more complicated journey: failed businesses, financial hardship, years spent selling face-to-face at farmers markets, and countless lessons about manufacturing, marketing, and leadership.

Nichole shares the practical lessons she learned building a physical product company from scratch: why founders should validate ideas before investing heavily, how small experiments create momentum, and why maintaining relationships with customers may be the greatest advantage a business can have.

The conversation expands into leadership, advocacy, and politics. Drawing on her experience leading women's business organizations and advocating for small-business policy, Nichole argues that trust is the missing ingredient in many institutions today. She outlines a vision for connecting communities, innovators, and policymakers in new ways, while reflecting on the role curiosity and courage play in building a better future.

Whether you're launching a business, leading a team, or simply wondering how meaningful change happens, this episode offers an honest look at the messy, human work of creating something that lasts.

Nichole MacDonald is an entrepreneur, product creator, and advocate for women and small business owners. She is the founder of Sash Bag, an alternative to the traditional handbag that grew into a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer business and a community of more than 22,000 women.

Nichole has spent more than two decades working in consumer product development and manufacturing. Her entrepreneurial experience—from hand-sewing early Sash Bag prototypes, selling directly to customers at farmers markets, and eventually scaling the company nationally—has shaped her approach to product development, marketing, community building, and leadership.

Her work has increasingly expanded into advocacy for women entrepreneurs and small businesses, including leadership roles with the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), serving as president of both the San Diego and California chapters.

At the heart of Nichole’s work is a belief in staying close to the people you serve—listening to them, building trust, and using that relationship to create better products, businesses, and communities.

Today, she works with entrepreneurs, creators, and leaders to build businesses rooted in authenticity, community, and purpose through consulting, speaking, and educational work.

—

Website: nicholemacdonald.com
LinkedIn: Nichole MacDonald
Instagram: @nichole.macdonald
Facebook: Nichole MacDonald
TikTok: @california.mac
Sash Bag: thesashbag.com

EPISODE SUMMARY

What if the goal of homeownership wasn't a payout at the end, but a say in what happens along the way? 

In this episode, Nathan sits down with Josh Newton, researcher, lecturer, and co-founder of the San Diego Community Wealth Building Coalition. Together they dig into two financial ownership models most people have never heard of: community land trusts and limited equity housing cooperatives.

Josh walks through how these models separate land ownership from what's built on top of it, why "limited equity" might be the wrong name for what's actually a form of shared equity, and how one-share-one-vote governance makes cooperative housing more democratic than the corporations most of us assume are the default. 

Along the way, Josh takes apart two of the most common arguments used to explain the housing crisis, supply-and-demand theory and "filtering." He also shares a real local example born out of decades of displacement: Barrio Logan's Tierra Indígenas land trust..

The conversation moves from mechanics to something bigger: what it would look like if cities were governed from the neighborhood up instead of the top down, and what's actually standing in the way. Hint: it’s a combination of education, funding, and political will… and not the models themselves.

ABOUT JOSH NEWTON

Josh Newton is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Public Policy from the University of Texas at Arlington. He has written on the impact of philanthropic foundations in housing and community development, housing precarity and grassroots solutions in informal subdivisions, and the economic and political benefits of community land trusts and limited equity housing cooperatives. Outside of academia, he co-founded the San Diego Community Wealth Building Coalition to expand and support community land trusts and housing, worker, and food cooperatives in the region through education, technical assistance, and policy advocacy.

LINKS

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/city-josh-newton/
• Instagram: instagram.com/cityjoshnewton/
• Website: cityjoshnewton.com
• San Diego Community Wealth Building Coalition: https://www.instagram.com/sdcwbc/
• Tierras Indígenas Community Land Trust
  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tierras_indigenas/
  • Website: https://www.tierrasindigenasclt.org/

Episode Summary

Susanna Peredo Swap has spent the last decade building something rare: a creative community in San Diego that operates on collaboration instead of competition. As founder of Vanguard Culture, she's brought together thousands of artists across every discipline — starting, almost by accident, from a single potluck where the first fifty people to RSVP were invited to bring not just food, but talent.

In this conversation, Susanna traces that arc from a scrappy email newsletter to a nonprofit and unpacks the philosophy underneath it: a "yes, and" approach borrowed straight from her years in theater, where saying yes to one more collaborator almost always makes the work better. She and Nathan dig into the tension between boldness and hubris; how a decade of professional rejection as an actor left her with less fear of failure; and stepping up to your creative strength, whether that’s in how you put your own work forward or how you build community.

We also talk about why she thinks the "starving artist" mindset is a kind of self-imposed sabotage, and the economic case for why a city's investment in its creative sector pays for itself many times over.

ABOUT SUSANNA PEREDO SWAP

Susanna Peredo Swap is an award-winning producer, journalist, and film director with 25+ years of experience in arts administration, acting, jazz vocals, arts advocacy, and public relations. At the San Diego International Airport Art Program, she curated over 80 exhibitions and led a dynamic performing arts series. 

She currently serves on several boards and advisory committees, including the San Diego Museum Council, San Diego Press Club, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, and One San Diego. She recently co-led Arts & Culture for World Design Capital San Diego–Tijuana, served on the board of Women in Tourism & Hospitality International, and advised UCSD-TV's ARTS Channel. 

Her passion for the arts led her to found Vanguard Culture, a nonprofit dedicated to uplifting San Diego's creative workforce — an organization that has won 82 awards for Excellence in Journalism, 2 Gold Anthem Awards presented by the Webbys, a feature on the National Geographic Channel, and an official Vanguard Culture Day designation from the County of San Diego marking 10 years of service to the arts community.

LINKS

• Website: vanguardculture.com
• Newsletter: Sign up here
• Free resource guide for creatives: Access here
• San Diego Arts Pass
• LinkedIn: Vanguard Culture
• Instagram: @vanguardculture
• Facebook: Vanguard Culture
• YouTube: @VanguardCultureSD
• Threads: @vanguardculture