Season 6, Episode 6 of Quakers Today

Episode Overview In our final episode of the season, we reflect on what we have learned and focus on concrete, practical next steps to align our money with our values. Moving beyond individual guilt and financial anxiety, we explore how practicing integrity and simplicity—combined with targeted collective action—can help us transform our economic systems and pursue shared liberation.

Key Takeaways

1. Integrity, Simplicity, and Radical Testimony

• In an economic system fueled by extraction, leaning into integrity helps us stay honest about where our money comes from and where it goes.
• Simplicity serves as a spiritual discipline that frees us from hyper-consumerism, aligns our daily choices with our values, and builds community resilience through mutual aid.
• Queries: In what ways can choosing simplicity free us from the constant pressures of consumerism? And how does our earning, spending, or tax-paying support—or resist—systems of war and violence?

2. Shifting from Individual Guilt to Collective Action

• Corporations are not people; they are profit-maximizing machines, which means we must shift our focus from seeking personal moral purity to utilizing organized economic leverage.
• Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to maintain “clean hands” on our own, we can join dynamic, targeted campaigns—like boycotts and divestments—to pressure corporate boards to do less harm.
• Queries: What becomes possible when we stop trying to carry the weight alone and start moving our resources together in community? When we look at our own institutional budgets, our banks, contractors, and tech platforms, how faithfully do our vendors reflect the values we hold?

3. Impact Investing and Reparative Economics

• We can move beyond merely boycotting what we oppose and start using regenerative finance and impact investing to actively fund the solutions we want to see.
• True economic justice requires shifting our mindset from traditional charity to structural reparations that rectify centuries of intentional harm.
• Queries: Is our financial stewardship merely avoiding harm, or is it actively co-creating racial and economic justice? How might our personal giving and our meeting’s budget shift from charity to structural reparations and wealth redistribution?

Next Steps: Where Do We Go From Here? Diana and Peterson suggest taking practical action across three interconnected rings:

• The Personal Step: Conduct a personal stewardship audit of your bank accounts, credit cards, and spending to identify one tangible area where you can better align your daily choices with your values.
• The Institutional Step: Bring these questions to the communities you belong to by introducing a query on ethical screening, proxy voting, or local impact investing to your Quaker meeting, church, or organization’s finance and trustees committees.
• The Collective Step: Do not act alone. Organize with others by visiting afsc.org/acca or investigate.info to join active corporate accountability campaigns, or participate in grassroots movements like Earth Quaker Action Team’s Never Vanguard campaign.

Resource Links & References

Action Center for Corporate Accountability Learn more about corporate accountability tools and active campaigns at https://afsc.org/acca

Investigate.info Research corporate complicity and find active divestment campaigns at https://investigate.info

Never Vanguard Campaign Join the Earth Quaker Action Team’s campaign demanding Vanguard stop funding fossil fuel expansion at https://eqat.org/never-vanguard

Quakers Today Website Explore podcast episodes, transcripts, and archives at https://quakerstoday.org

Friends Journal Read articles, poetry, and commentary exploring contemporary Quaker thought and witness at https://friendsjournal.org

Community Engagement Question

What becomes possible when we stop trying to carry the weight alone—and start moving our resources together in community? Leave a voicemail at 317-QUAKERS (317-782-5377) or email [email protected].

Episode Sponsors

American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) The American Friends Service Committee works with communities worldwide to challenge injustice, meet urgent community needs, and build conditions for lasting peace. AFSC’s Emerging Leaders for Liberation program helps young adults ages 18 to 22 develop social justice and leadership skills. Learn more and apply at https://afsc.org/ELL

Friends Fiduciary Friends Fiduciary unites Quaker values with expert investing. They serve more than 460 organizations with ethical portfolios, shareholder advocacy, and a deep commitment to justice and sustainability. They walk the walk on environmental stewardship, with a Quaker Growth & Income Fund carbon footprint 70% smaller than the benchmark. Learn more at https://friendsfiduciary.org

Financial & Legal Disclaimer

All investments involve risk, and financial decisions should be made based on your individual circumstances, ideally in consultation with a qualified professional. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host, Natural Investments, or its affiliates.

Diana Gisel Yañez is an Investment Advisor Representative of Natural Investments PBLLC. Natural Investments is an independent Registered Investment Advisor. Quakers Today and Friends Publishing Corporation are not registered entities and are not affiliates or subsidiaries of Natural Investments.

Next Episode

Next month we’re doing a special interim season episode as we prepare for Season Seven of Quakers Today. We feature a powerful conversation with Norma Wong, a Zen Buddhist teacher and indigenous activist, exploring a way of living that aligns deeply with how Quakers see the world.

 

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Transcript

Chapter 1: Introduction and the Tension of Simplicity

00:00 – Dov Baum: Corporations are not people. And because they are not people, they cannot be good or evil. They are just machines.

00:23 – Diana Yañez: This podcast is for educational purposes. Please consider your situation carefully when making investment decisions.

00:34 – Peterson Toscano: Hello, I’m Peterson Toscano.

00:36 – Diana Yañez: And I’m Diana Yañez.

00:37 – Peterson Toscano: This is the final episode of Season Six of the Quakers Today podcast, a project of Friends Publishing Corporation.

00:46 – Diana Yañez: Today, in our sixth episode, we’re looking back at what we’ve learned, asking deep questions to carry forward, and focusing on concrete, practical next steps to align our money with our values.

01:00 – Peterson Toscano: Our guests in today’s episode include Rich Kent, Dov Baum, Lisa Graustein, and Lucy Duncan. This season of Quakers Today would not be possible without the support of our sponsors, Friends Fiduciary and the American Friends Service Committee. Thank you for your ongoing support.

01:21 – Peterson Toscano: For generations, integrity and simplicity are values that Quakers have wrestled with and practiced. In a world run by corporations and fueled by extractive practices, leaning into integrity helps us stay honest about where our money comes from and where it goes.

01:42 – Diana Yañez: I think of integrity as being willing to look at the whole picture—the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable parts of our economic systems. Integrity compels us as individuals and meetings to stop looking away and consider the true impact of our choices.

02:00 – Peterson Toscano: When I first began looking closely at how deeply my life is tied to harmful systems, I felt a lot of shame. But shame doesn’t help us heal. When we replace fear with curiosity, we can see how money flows through our lives, make concrete choices, and act together as a community.

02:18 – Diana Yañez: That’s where simplicity comes in. It’s a spiritual discipline that frees us from hyper-consumerism and helps us align our daily choices with our values.

02:28 – Peterson Toscano: Simplicity also builds community resilience as our climate changes. Living simply allows for nimbleness and mutual aid. It creates space for shared meals, carpools, community gardens, and sharing what we have rather than buying everything brand new.

02:44 – Diana Yañez: This summer, while attending the Friends General Conference gathering, I met Friends who take this even further. Through low-income war tax resistance, they intentionally keep their income below the taxable threshold so that zero tax dollars go toward military spending or foreign intervention.

03:00 – Peterson Toscano: But not everyone can do this, right? Not everyone can have that profound witness. It might be something that we’re aspiring for. Many of us and most of our Quaker meetings, schools, and organizations do steward funds, though—pensions and endowments that live directly inside the market.

03:19 – Diana Yañez: Exactly. And that can create real tension. How do we balance radical values like simplicity, justice, and integrity with the practical need to manage institutional assets? Rich Kent from Friends Fiduciary speaks directly to this fiduciary balance.

03:36 – Rich Kent: You could say that you’re willing to give up return, but at the end of the day you need your money to keep pace with inflation. You need the purchasing power there. It’s supposed to last a long time. Our goal is to make sure that happens, that you have the funds you need when you need them.

03:59 – Peterson Toscano: To carry this perspective into your own life and your meeting or congregation, here are two queries we invite you to sit with:

04:08 – Diana Yañez: In what ways can choosing simplicity free us from the constant pressures of consumerism?

04:15 – Peterson Toscano: And how does our earning, spending, or tax-paying support or resist systems of war and violence? Learning how deeply our finances are entangled with harmful systems can trigger shame. How can I possibly buy groceries, pay taxes, or save for the future without doing harm?

Chapter 2: Shifting to Collective Action and BDS

04:36 – Diana Yañez: However, when we get stuck in individual guilt, we miss where real power lives. Trying to maintain personal “clean hands” in a global economy is exhausting, and on our own, our leverage is limited. When we come together to take targeted collective action through boycotts, divestment, and shareholder advocacy, systems can begin to move.

05:00 – Peterson Toscano: I spoke about this with Dov Baum, director of the Action Center for Corporate Accountability at the American Friends Service Committee. Dov reminded me that we often misunderstand what corporations actually are—and how change really happens.

05:15 – Dov Baum: Corporations are not people, and because they are not people, they cannot be good or evil. They are just machines. Machines that maximize profits. That’s what they do. That’s how they work. They are robots. So they can do a lot of harm in the world and they can do good in the world, and still they are not good or bad. So the question is, how are we going to affect them to do less harm? That’s the only thing. When we target corporations, we really think they can do less harm. Otherwise, why target them? The lists of companies that we provide to investors have to be dynamic. We have to have a dynamic list that keeps adding and subtracting and measuring the behavior of companies using those criteria, because that’s how we make an impact.

06:06 – Diana Yañez: A clear example of this dynamic strategy is BDS. That stands for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. A broad coalition of Palestinian community groups, labor unions, and students launched the BDS movement, and it was modeled directly on the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa. Strategic campaigns don’t ask people to boycott everything; that’s impossible. Instead, they focus collective power on specific targets, high-impact targets. Analysts track corporate complicity using clear criteria. They research companies making heavy machinery used to demolish Palestinian homes, tech firms supplying surveillance and biometric checkpoints, and corporations building border walls and private prisons.

06:50 – Peterson Toscano: When universities, city councils, and faith communities coordinate divestment based on those exact, researched lists, the impacts magnify. The boycott and divestment campaign raises the cost of doing business, and it puts real financial and reputational pressure on corporate boards to change their contracts. As Dov pointed out, this shifts our focus entirely. Our goal advances beyond personal moral purity.

07:22 – Dov Baum: Individual action is really about making you feel good about yourself in the world. You have to understand that you are part of a very repressive and violent system. The economic system, but also the political system around us is causing a lot of harm. I think of it as a two-tiered position. Your own personal convictions and how you want to work with them on one level. And then there is more the collective level of building movement and working in a movement, which is quite different. It brings home that feeling of agency that we have in the world. Just like any activism takes us out of passivity into a realm when we are working with others to affect change. Even if we are not very successful at once, we still regain that feeling of being part of something that can build towards a better future. And that is a very powerful experience.

08:24 – Peterson Toscano: Whenever possible, we can move beyond personal peace of mind to engage in strategic collective action.

08:32 – Diana Yañez: The goal is to get past personal paralysis and step into our collective strength. Here are two queries to hold with your community. First, what becomes possible when we stop trying to carry the weight alone and start moving our resources together in community?

08:52 – Peterson Toscano: And second, when we look at our own institutional budgets—our banks, contractors, and tech platforms—how faithfully do our vendors reflect the values we hold? Most of us are familiar with boycotting and divesting. They are clear ways of saying “no” to what we don’t want to support. But what about using our financial resources to build up what we do want?

Chapter 3: Impact Investing and Reparations

09:16 – Diana Yañez: That’s impact investing and regenerative finance. Moving beyond negative screens to actively fund solutions. Lisa Graustein, a Quaker with inherited wealth and member of the Three Rivers Meeting in Massachusetts, reminds us that money is ultimately about power.

09:33 – Lisa Graustein: Money is a tool and it is a tool of power. How are we using it to co-create with other people, to share power with other people, and to begin to rectify the centuries of intentional inequity and harm that have been done that also fall along race lines in this country. And so I think there are so many opportunities for Friends, testimonies, and faith to examine how we’re currently using money and go much further than we are.

10:04 – Diana Yañez: Lisa’s point about rectifying intentional harm connects directly to the conversation around reparations. Lucy Duncan from Green Street Meeting and Reparation Works challenges us to look honestly at where our giving goes.

10:19 – Lucy Duncan: Assess whether you’re doing charity or whether you’re doing reparations. If you’re engaged in a reparations project, is it really transferring wealth and money? Is it addressing some of the systemic issues?

10:33 – Peterson Toscano: Diana, you know that before starting this series with you, I felt overwhelmed by the complexity and moral weight of money, and I didn’t want to look at it. I operated with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mindset mostly driven by financial anxiety. Listening to our guests this season—folks like Lisa Graustein, Lucy Duncan, Fran Brokaw, and Anthony Smith—they inspired me to replace that fear with curiosity and seek genuine transformation, both in my own life and how my Quaker meeting handles its money.

11:10 – Diana Yañez: You’re making my heart sing. That’s the reason that I really wanted this project to come alive. To help us move from traditional charity into transformative repair, here are two queries to hold: Is our financial stewardship merely avoiding harm, or is it actively co-creating racial and economic justice?

11:27 – Peterson Toscano: And how might our personal giving and our meeting’s budget shift from charity, which isn’t a terrible thing, but to something better—to structural reparations and wealth redistribution? Diana, after six episodes exploring Quakers and money, let us outline the concrete, practical next steps we all can take and carry forward.

Chapter 4: Practical Next Steps

11:47 – Diana Yañez: We can think of our next steps in three interconnected rings: personal, institutional, and collective. Through the lenses of simplicity and integrity, conduct a personal stewardship audit of your bank accounts, credit cards, and spending. Identify just one tangible area where you can align your daily choices with your values. And remember that this is an ongoing process, not an overnight fix.

12:15 – Peterson Toscano: Second, the institutional step. Bring these deep questions to the communities you belong to. Introduce a query on ethical screening, proxy voting, or local impact investing to your Quaker meeting, church, or organization’s finance and trustees committees.

12:30 – Diana Yañez: And third, the collective step. Don’t act alone. Organize with others. Visit afsc.org/acca or investigate.info to research corporate accountability and join an active campaign. You can find both of these links in our show notes.

12:44 – Peterson Toscano: You can also join grassroots movements like Earth Quaker Action Team’s Never Vanguard campaign, where Friends and allies are taking collective action to demand that Vanguard stop pouring billions into fossil fuel expansion. Learn more at eqat.org/never-vanguard. When we combine personal…

13:06 – Diana Yañez: …simplicity, institutional integrity, and collective movement-building, our relationship with money stops being a source of isolation and becomes an avenue for shared liberation.

Chapter 5: Sponsor Messages, Credits, and Conclusion

13:21 – Peterson Toscano: And as you learn and engage in ethical finance and intentional living, please feel free to connect with us. You could always call and leave us a voicemail. The number is 317-QUAKERS. That’s 317-782-5377. Add a plus one if you’re calling from outside the United States.

13:38 – Diana Yañez: You can also email us at [email protected]. That’s [email protected].

13:45 – Peterson Toscano: Thank you for joining us for Season Six of Quakers Today.

13:49 – Diana Yañez: For show notes, links to all the resources mentioned in this episode, plus a full transcript, visit QuakersToday.org. You can also see a full video version of this episode at the Friends Journal YouTube channel.

14:04 – Peterson Toscano: This episode and all the episodes in Season Six of Quakers Today are sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. The American Friends Service Committee works with communities worldwide to challenge injustice, meet urgent community needs, and build conditions for lasting peace.

14:24 – Diana Yañez: AFSC’s Emerging Leaders for Liberation program helps young adults ages 18 to 22 develop social justice and leadership skills. Over eight months, participants learn about organizing, advocacy, anti-racism, Quaker principles, and create a community action project. If you’re connected to an AFSC program, a Quaker college, school, meeting, or church, consider applying at afsc.org/ELL.

14:52 – Peterson Toscano: Season Six of Quakers Today is also sponsored by Friends Fiduciary. Friends Fiduciary unites Quaker values with expert investing. They serve more than 460 organizations with ethical portfolios, shareholder advocacy, and a deep commitment to justice and sustainability.

15:15 – Diana Yañez: They walk the walk on environmental stewardship. The Quaker Growth and Income Fund has a carbon footprint 70% smaller than the benchmark. Friends Fiduciary promotes aggressive, science-based targets for reducing carbon emissions and urges companies to adopt clear, immediate climate transition plans. Learn more at friendsfiduciary.org.

15:42 – Peterson Toscano: Diana, I’m grateful that our sponsors are people who care about these money matters in such a clear way. We’ve included them in this episode, both AFSC and Friends Fiduciary, and in previous episodes. Not because they’re our sponsors, it’s just they’re doing this work and it just fit beautifully. I’m happy that we have sponsors that align with our values. That’s really important to me. Quakers Today is a project of Friends Publishing Corporation. Visit friendsjournal.org to read thousands, literally thousands, of articles about Quaker faith, practice, and more. And it’s all free.

16:21 – Diana Yañez: This episode of the Quakers Today podcast was written and presented by Peterson Toscano and me, Diana Yañez. Peterson edited and produced the audio and video. Music from this episode comes from Epidemic Sound.

16:38 – Peterson Toscano: Now for you listening, it means a great deal to Diana and me whenever you share Quakers Today with others. That’s how we grow. So we encourage you to share these conversations, especially this season. We know it’s not for everyone, but there’s a time in their life they’re like, “I want to really look at these money matters.” So please feel free. Create a post on your social media, email someone you think would appreciate the show, or share it in your Quaker meeting or organization.

17:10 – Diana Yañez: And Peterson, thank you again for the opportunity to have these discussions with me. Finance is my passion. It’s my calling. It’s even my ministry. And I’m so glad we were able to explore these themes together.

17:28 – Peterson Toscano: Diana, you’re very welcome. Thank you. It’s been such a great collaboration and I learned a great deal. And I’m a different person in many ways in regards to my finances because of you.

17:42 – Diana Yañez: So thank you to you listening. Thank you for wrestling with these deep questions and for taking steps towards a more just world.

17:50 – Peterson Toscano: And I’m just wondering one more time, Diana, before we go, could you please give us one of those incredibly beautiful disclaimers?

18:02 – Diana Yañez: Of course, with pleasure. Remember that all investments involve risk, and financial decisions should be made based on your individual circumstances, ideally in consultation with a qualified professional. The views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the hosts, Natural Investments, or its affiliates.

18:28 – Peterson Toscano: Next month we’re doing an interim season as we prepare for Season Seven of Quakers Today. And I have a very, very special interview to share with you with Norma Wong. Norma is a Zen Buddhist teacher and also a longtime indigenous activist. She’s going to talk to us about a source way, a way of living that aligns very much with the way Quakers see the world.

18:52 – Norma Wong: We have to actually realign in terms of how we are going to reconstitute the human beingness within the democracy experiment. How that might occur during times of relative stability don’t matter. How does that operate in a time of maximum crisis where everything is being attacked from inside and outside? What is it that we stand for and how do we reconstitute ourselves to be in that? If we abandon each other for an ideal, then we would have totally lost our way.

19:35 – Peterson Toscano: As we end this season, may we ask the deep questions and choose simplicity…

19:44 – Diana Yañez: …act with courage and walk together toward equity and peace.

19:50 – Peterson Toscano: Peace and blessings on your journey.