In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, civic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders across Minnesota faced an urgent imperative: how do we move past polite statements and build genuine, long-term economic power for Black communities?
Minnesota holds a painful paradox. While the state consistently ranks near the top for quality of life and business opportunity, disaggregating that data by race reveals stark, deeply entrenched wealth disparities.
When Adair Mosley stepped into the role of inaugural CEO at the GroundBreak Coalition, he brought a refusal to settle for incremental change. GroundBreak set an extraordinarily bold goal: mobilizing $5.3 billion over ten years to close racial wealth gaps across homeownership, entrepreneurship, and commercial real estate.
Yet setting an ambitious target is one thing. Designing the financial and civic machinery to deliver it is another.
The lightbulb moment at Stanford
Just a few weeks into his new role, Adair joined the Integrating Philanthropy and Investing executive training program, co-hosted by the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) and Stanford PACS.
He was looking to deepen his technical understanding of impact investing tools. What he found instead was an operational blueprint.
During the program, Adair engaged deeply with CSP’s Multicapital Strategy Framework, led by CSP’s Director of Research, Kirsten Andersen. While the framework was originally developed to help private wealth holders inventory their non-financial resources, Adair saw a wider application.
“As I was reading through the multicapital strategy, it was a big aha moment for me,” Adair recalled. “I believed this framework was actually going to be the structure for GroundBreak. It works extremely well for coalitions.”
GroundBreak transformed that research into its core theory of change and organizational structure. Rather than treating money as the only tool, GroundBreak organized its entire strategy and its leadership team around four distinct, interconnected capitals.
- Economic capital. Deploying $50,000 down-payment assistance grants for homebuyers, forgivable growth loans for entrepreneurs, and low-cost patient debt for real estate developers.
- Social capital. Building deep, relational trust and seamless handoffs across a coalition of more than 40 corporate, civic, and philanthropic partners.
- Cultural capital. Partnering with financial institutions to re-examine underwriting algorithms and dismantle exclusionary lending traditions.
- Symbolic capital. Harnessing narrative power and public legitimacy to shift regional mindsets around Black economic justice.
What capital integration actually looks like in practice
Traditional finance often operates in rigid silos, with grantmaking sitting in one bucket, commercial lending in another, and private equity somewhere else entirely. True capital integration starts with the desired outcome and designs the capital tools around it.
To mobilize large pools of private bank capital for Black entrepreneurs and home buyers who have historically faced systemic redlining, GroundBreak uses an innovative credit enhancement tool: unfunded corporate and philanthropic guarantees.
Institutions keep their capital on their own balance sheets where it continues to yield returns. Simultaneously, that capital serves as pooled collateral at the bank, putting GroundBreak in a first-loss position. By absorbing the initial risk, GroundBreak de-risks loans for commercial banks, unlocking massive flows of private capital that would otherwise sit on the sidelines.
Over its ten-year horizon, GroundBreak aims to support 11,000 new homeowners, fund 5,000 entrepreneurs creating 8,000 jobs, and back 60 major commercial development projects.
From theory to real-world playbooks
GroundBreak’s journey demonstrates why peer-led executive education matters. When wealth holders, foundation leaders, and coalition executives step out of their daily routines to learn alongside one another, abstract frameworks turn into practical, regional playbooks.
Integration is about bringing every tool at your disposal — your balance sheet, your relationships, your influence, and your governance — into alignment behind a shared purpose.
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