The Clean Money Revolution by Joel Solomon

Author:Joel Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2017-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

An Extraordinary Woman

Carol is an exuberant, visionary strategist. She was born in upstate New York to a wealthy business family: her father was CFO of the Newell Manufacturing Company, a third-generation family business that got its start making curtain rods. Her hometown of Ogdensburg is near the Thousand Islands area at the Ontario border, formed by the great St. Lawrence River. She spent her childhood summers at the family cottage on the shore of those waters, forming a lifelong love of nature. Devotion to ecological causes would have been a very good guess as to her future contributions to the world.

Carol and I have many things in common. Like me, she fell in love with the British Columbia coast but grew up far away. We both make our homes in Vancouver and on Cortes Island. We both believe in long-term thinking. We know that money is a powerful tool for making the world better, if used thoughtfully and with the right values and goals. We have faith that people will do the right thing with the right tools in the right conditions if given the right information.

When Carol was nine, her father died of a sudden heart attack. The tragedy prompted her mother to take his seat on Newell’s board of directors. At 47, she helped to guide a major company as it planned to go public, and beyond for 16 years. By the time Carol was 16, her mother had introduced her to managing the family investment portfolio. Her first inheritance, of several million dollars, came when she was 21. She tended to her accounts, but didn’t make too much of the assets at the time.

“The amount I first received back in 1977, in my early twenties, was significant, but I didn’t pay much attention to it, other than to manage it as it came to me — mostly family stock and dividends,” she says. “When I received my second inheritance, in my mid-thirties, it was much larger and thus a whole different ballgame. I knew more, and I had a sense of mission.”

As with many inheritors, that new situation raised profound questions. “I suddenly began thinking of all the possibilities connected with that amount of capital.”

Carol spent her twenties studying geology at college and afterward as a field assistant. She traveled abroad and tended to a home with her husband, who was a professional geologist. Field geology led to Carol tromping around the backcountry of various places, and the travel led her to consider the relationship of people and place. Those early influences furthered her growing passion for ecological protection and smart, efficient uses of resources.

In the mid ’80s, while living in Middlebury, Vermont, Carol read about an unusual conference on socially responsible investing (SRI) in New Hampshire, produced by the same group that Josh Mailman had encountered as a student, the Haymarket Fund. One of the presenters, Amy Domini, founder of Domini Social Investments, was a leading SRI pioneer. Something mobilized in Carol when she heard Amy speak.

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