Forward Global Summit 2025 | Janine Firpo, Invest for Better & Activate Your Money

Clips
More from Forward Global Summit 2025

Janine Firpo

Co-Founder, Invest for Better & Author

Activate Your Money

play_circle_outline Empowering Women in Finance Through Invest for Better: Achieving Financial Empowerment and Impact Investing

play_circle_outline Open source strategy to spread impact investing knowledge

play_circle_outline Community-based investing for positive local impact

play_circle_outline Goals for the year include open source success and national marketing campaign

Info
Transcript

Janine Firpo, Invest for Better & Activate Your Money

Janine Firpo

Co-Founder, Invest for Better & Author Activate Your Money

Exploring Social Impact and Financial Empowerment at Forward Global Summit 2025

Janine Firpo, an insightful author and social entrepreneur, joins theCUBE at the Forward Global Summit 2025 in Los Angeles. Firpo, co-founder of the non-profit Invest for Better, shares a mission to empower women to actively participate in the financial realm by introducing the initiative Activate Your Money. This session delves into democratizing financial literacy and creating a sustainable global economy for future generations.

In this session, Firpo discusses... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is the main goal of helping women step into their financial power and understand investing? add

What is the motivation behind working to increase women's wealth and power? add

What initiatives are you involved in to support small businesses in your community and empower female entrepreneurs? add

What are the goals for this year regarding open sourcing work, helping people make money, and a national marketing campaign for women's awareness about money? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Janine Firpo, Invest for Better & Activate Your Money

search

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE. We're here in Los Angeles for the Forward Global Summit 2025. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This is where the top minds and thinkers and doers are coming together to solve the world problems. Things are changing, people are looking at new systems, new ways to do things, but the democratization of impact philanthropy, everyone's now a philanthropist, community is a big theme. Janine Firpo is here, she is doing some amazing work. She's got a non-profit, and she's a social entrepreneur and author, by the way, helping women get their finances, get investing, learn, grow, build out a financial future. Did I get that right?

Janine Firpo

>> Yes. But part of it too is that they're doing it with their eye toward how we build an economy that works for everybody, and that's going to be sustainable enough that we feel confident handing it off to our children and grandchildren.

>> That's awesome. Take a minute to explain the project, what service you guys are doing. You're a non-profit, so all the service is all in. What are you guys doing, what's the specific focus and scope?

Janine Firpo

>> Well, one of the things that we feel is that women have been left out of the financial conversation for a very long time. In fact, it was only 50 years ago that women had the right to get a loan without a male co-signing, and so it's not surprising that we're not very confident when it comes to investing. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to help women step into their financial power, really understand how investing works, be able to manage and control their own money, and while they're doing that, do it with an eye to what the money is actually doing in the world, because every dollar we have is having an impact somehow, and if you're not paying attention, it's probably upholding the status quo and things that we don't agree in. And so, we're helping women understand there's alternatives.

>> Just real quick, just housekeeping, how long has it been around, focused, what's the origination story? Take us through some of that data.

Janine Firpo

>> Sure. So we were founded as a non-profit in 2021, so we're relatively new. My co-founder had started this as an initiative under another non-profit two years prior. I made big changes in my career, I did a lot of work in international development, prior to that, tech, made big changes in my career to make a change in the world. And realized at one point that my money was undermining me, it was funding the very problems that I was trying to solve. So close to 20 years ago, I made a personal choice to figure out how to invest all of my money, starting with my cash, straight through the public markets across to real estate that I had in ways that created the world I wanted to see. I retired from my international career in 2018 and realized that a lot of women were like me, they wanted to do this too, as well as young people. So I ended up writing a book called Activate Your Money: Invest to Grow Your Wealth and Build a Better World, because this is not about giving up financial return, it's getting both. And then, I met my co-founder and we were like, let's work together, and we co-founded Invest for Better.

>> That's a great story. And by the way, congratulations, I think this is a wonderful thing, control your own destiny, design your life.

Janine Firpo

>> Exactly.

>> This is really what people are talking about right now. And also, find your tribe is another theme.

Janine Firpo

>> Exactly.

>> What are some of the things that are connecting you here at Forward Global, and how does that relate into what you're doing?

Janine Firpo

>> So I think it's all about community. So part of the way that we are training women is we don't just have them go to an online course, we don't just give them the kinds of materials that they address themselves. We actually put them in small groups of eight to 20 women and they go through a facilitated series of conversations together, and the thing that we hear a lot from the women in our group is how much they love actually having people who are like them to talk about money. And I think it's the same thing here, this is about a community, it's about people who have similar purpose and goals and who can further those by getting sparked by ideas from somebody else who can see something in a different way because of the conversation and who can stay in contact between the conferences.

>> How do people get involved? How do people find out how to engage? How do you guys engage with women? Are you guys looking for partners? Take a minute to explain how it all works.

Janine Firpo

>> Sure. So the way to find us is just investforbetter.org. And this year in particular, we realized how important it is for women to take control of their own lives, and so we are now giving away free memberships. So you can go to investforbetter.org/membership and join, and you'll get our newsletters and you'll learn all about what we're doing that way. So we also are looking for partnerships. One of the things that I realized is the way that we're really going to achieve scale, we're never going to do it on our own, so we are now open sourcing our content. We're going to be giving it to other people who believe in this kind of thing and are willing to take it and run with it in their own organizations, they can put it under their own labels. So we're looking for people who are interested in educating their membership around this kind of investing and we'll help them do it.

>> I've got to say, I'm very blown away by the open source comment, that is a huge breakthrough. Can you share more about the strategy? I personally believe that open source content will create more value, kind of like the open source software wave.

Janine Firpo

>> Exactly.

>> Do you guys think about it that way? Was it more of a spread the love or was it more of-

Janine Firpo

>> It's spread the love. I am retired, I don't get paid. My co-founder is retired, she doesn't get paid. I work 10-hour days. I'm not doing this because I need something, I'm doing this because I want to change the world, and I think that fundamentally, women's wealth can do that. By 2030, women will control 35% of the wealth in this country. That's powerful. Money is power. And by and large, that power has been not in the hands of women, and it's time for us to step up and take that power. And I am smart enough to realize that I am not going to do this single-handedly, so the more people that we can get involved in our cause, the better, and if that includes my helping them take what we've done and run with it themselves, then all the better too.

>> Yeah. And I think the thing about open source is you build on the shoulders of giants before you, and so getting that flywheel going of participation and engagement. Are there any partnerships that you're looking for, folks watching might say, "Hey, how do I get involved?" Not volunteer, but if I own an organization, I can grab your content. What are the ways can someone engage with your awesome team?

Janine Firpo

>> So if somebody wants to engage, they can find me on LinkedIn, send me a message that way. We would love partnerships with other organizations that have large memberships of women, professional women who could benefit from this kind of training, that would be one thing. We're happy to partner with anybody who is in the investment space, who's interested in sharing this kind of information as well. We're also interested in partnering with financial advisors or financial coaches or people who are building their own business around education. We're reaching out to people in the finance influencer community, so people who have the TikTok stations and the YouTube channels and all of those, we will share our content with you so that you can speak about this too.

>> It's a great way to build more community through the influencers.

Janine Firpo

>> Exactly.

>> And also, you can be a content studio funneling content to their audience.

Janine Firpo

>> Well, who knows? That may be where this ends up going, we'll see.

>> We'll have to get down to theCUBE at the NYSE, because that's where the money is.

Janine Firpo

>> Yeah, yeah, exactly.

>> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Final question for you, the conference, what's the big takeaway here at Forward Global Summit 2025 for you? Is there anything that jumps out at you, something new that you learned, something that verified what you already knew? Share your opinions.

Janine Firpo

>> So some of the conversations that I'm starting to hear are people are beginning to think that they need to go farther. This is basically a philanthropy group. But if you think of all of the money that's in philanthropy in this country, it's only one quarter of 1% of the total capital markets, which is what was told to us earlier today. One quarter of 1% of all the money-

>> It's nothing, minuscule.

Janine Firpo

>> It's nothing, it's a drop in the bucket. And so, we need to start thinking about how we use the rest of our money to make change, and we can do that. And I'm hearing people realizing that maybe that's an important direction to go.

>> And I think Forward Global is doing so many innovative things because they're creating new vehicles to fill the gaps. Susan McCormick was on the show earlier, we did a deep dive podcast, could have gone an hour with her because she's amazing.

Janine Firpo

>> She is amazing.

>> She's the one who said that comment on stage and she's just incredible. But her vision of creating a new scaffolding around side-carding impact investors with commercial folks like me who want to have a commercial value, and investors maybe, and so that is a new power dynamic.

Janine Firpo

>> It's great. It's a really important way to think about this is to bring in philanthropy so that it's a guarantee or it's a lower tier, taking the risk out of a particular investment or a particular opportunity, and then piling capital on top of that for people who are looking for different returns. And you could choose first a layer of people who are willing to get a lower return for the value, but ultimately, at the top of that stack, you can have people who are looking for a market rate return. And in the work that I do and in what I'm helping other women do, it's all about market rate return. I really do not want to give... I'm not, and many of the women we work with are non-accredited investors, which means that they-

>> You're locked out of deals.

Janine Firpo

>> They're locked out of everything. They're basically investing in the stock market. They have less than $1 million in net worth, excluding their home. Only 10% of this country's population is accredited investors, so we need to be thinking about those of us who are not accredited and how they can start moving their assets too.

>> Is there any example or anecdote you could share that could give people some perspective on some of the impact you're making, a comment or best practice or an email, "Oh my God ."

Janine Firpo

>> What I'm talking to people about is start with your cash. Think about where you bank, think about what that bank is doing with your money, and if you don't know, then do some work to get your money out of that bank and put it into a bank that's more aligned with your values. There are banks that you can put your money in that are in your community, that are serving and providing loans to underserved communities. I'm in a bank that is all about giving loans to people who want EVs or solar panels or other types of environmentally-sustainable technologies, I feel great being in that bank. There are banks that are designed specifically for female entrepreneurs and helping them. There are banks for Black people run by Blacks, there are banks for Native Americans. There's a great website called Mighty Deposits, I think it's dot-org, that you can go on. You can put your bank in, it'll tell you what your bank is doing in the world, and it'll give you a lot of choices about-

>> It's like a Yelp rating.

Janine Firpo

>> It is. I love Mighty Deposits. There are so many great tools on the web for people around their banks, around the stock market, around so many things that they can just think differently.

>> Yeah. I think it's one of those things where you mentioned values, aligning values with your money, you can do that now.

Janine Firpo

>> You can do that, and you've been able to do it for a while. And one of the things too that I would remind people is that this is not something new, this kind of investing. In fact, it started in this country in the mid-1700s when the Quakers said, "Our members cannot benefit from the slave trade," that's where it started. It goes back actually millennium. It's got deep roots in religion, Islamic law, Jewish law, the Pope has decrees about how to invest your values if you're a Catholic, Protestant groups, all kinds of groups. So this has a deep religious element to it, and it's been in this country, as I said, since the mid-1700s, but really started an uptake again in the 1960s and 1980s.

>> Yeah. My big takeaway from this event is community.

Janine Firpo

>> Very much so.

>> And obviously storytelling is a big theme, and also, stories do power movements. But I just think community will be that new thread, whether it's local journalism or community banks that could use the deposits if everyone just went there and we had a little league team or whatever, whatever is going on, things happen in communities.

Janine Firpo

>> In community. In fact, I just started what we call a regional hub in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I live, and we brought 30 women together just earlier this week to start talking about our money, and a small group of us are going to start looking at how can we maybe give loans, debt instruments, to small businesses in our own community. I invested in a bagel shop that's down the street from me, I'm helping a female entrepreneur build an amazing business, and she has been amazing in paying me back. I'm getting an 8% return on that money, it's a pretty good return. And I think we can do more of that, where we start to look at how can we help our communities, how can we help the people in our communities get what they need.

>> It really makes a difference. Thank you for doing that. And again, local is everything, local and community and trust network. Elliott Donnelley and I have a shared vision, he has a much deeper vision, but I love his notion of trust networks, and they're not replacing anything, they're just building on top of our existing relationships, but getting close proximity. And with digital and physical coming together, you could donate content. Where is that going lead? You don't know. It could be a massive success here, okay over here, but bigger here.

Janine Firpo

>> You never know.

>> Serendipity.

Janine Firpo

>> You never know. At one point in my career, I was an evangelist at Apple Computer back in the 1980s, and as an evangelist, my job was to get... This was like in the early days of the Mac, early, early, early, pre-laptop, pre all that stuff, I still remember the SE, that .

>> I do, yeah, with one little floppy disk.

Janine Firpo

>> Yes.

>> Three and a half inch.

Janine Firpo

>> I remember that stuff. So my job was to get software developers to create their products on our platform before anybody else. And it was sort of like throwing seeds in a field and watering everything, and you never knew which one was actually going to really sprout and go. The one you thought was died, the one you had no idea was ended up being a huge win. So I think that's very true, you never know, when you just put things out there, where it will really pop.

>> Yeah. I love the fact that you've got the Apple story. I've lived in Palo Alto for the last 25 years, and so Steve and Lorraine were there and their kids went to school. What was it like working with Steve Jobs in the early days? Was he a bull in the china shop? Give us the stories.

Janine Firpo

>> Well, when I was there, he was gone already sadly.

>> He already got fired by Sculley.

Janine Firpo

>> Yes, yes, yes. Sculley was there when I was there. I was there from, I think, the mid-1980s to 1991, I think was my tenure there.

>> Yeah. I remember the Apple days, because I went to school, it was more PC, because PC had modems connected to them, but then PCs went the other way, now I'm a Mac because... Remember the virus days, all the virus on Windows?

Janine Firpo

>> Oh yeah.

>> I digress.

Janine Firpo

>> I know, you digress. But a lot of people who just see the technology we have today, they don't realize what the... I worked in Africa using dial-up modems that would take like 10 minutes for something to download, I remember those days, I did that stuff.

>> Well, final question for you, what's your goals? What's your goals for the year? What are you trying to do? What are your top objectives?

Janine Firpo

>> So my goals for this year are really to, one, we really want to see this idea of putting the work out open source more available, really take off and see if that really works. We want to help people make money from doing this. Even if we're not making money, I want other people to be making money from it. And I also am working on a national marketing campaign to raise women's awareness around the power and the potential of their money, and doing that on behalf of about 150 other people right now, and so I want to see that go viral too.

>> Yeah. I think you can get a lot of young Gen Zs coming in too, because they're going to take control of their destinies as well.

Janine Firpo

>> Yeah, absolutely.

>> Congratulations, great cause. Thanks for coming on-

Janine Firpo

>> Thank you. Thank you so much....

>> our program here at Forward Global, our first event here in the community, thanks for coming on.

Janine Firpo

>> My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

>> Okay. We are in LA where all the action is, all the smartest people coming together to bring community content and the top issues of the day to make the world a better place. A lot of energy, a lot of community, and the systems are changing and philanthropy is going to adjust to the dynamics of the market. Of course, theCUBE's got it here covered. Thanks for watching.