In the season six premiere, host Peterson Toscano is joined by new co-host Diana Yañez, a certified financial planner and convinced Quaker. Together, they move “into the wallet” to explore money not just as personal math, but as a spiritual practice and communal responsibility. This episode introduces the concept of “The Priesthood of All Believers Economics,” arguing that every Friend has a role in discerning where money goes rather than leaving it to the “high priests of Wall Street.”

Money Biographies

• Diana Yañez: Reflects on her “gross” introduction to finance during the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, witnessing her mother face foreclosure while corporations received bailouts. This dissonance led to her calling to help others bridge the gap between values, security, and money.
• Peterson Toscano: Shares his experience as a server for executives at American Express and Exxon, witnessing extreme wealth—like flowers flown in weekly from France—while simultaneously working at a youth after-school program he loved.

Some Voices of the Season

We hear brief perspectives from some of the guests who will be featured throughout the season, including:

• • Amy Carr & Ethan Birchard (Friends Fiduciary): Discussing the business case for Quaker values and holding the tension between performance and ethics.
  • Douglas Tsoi: On value-based pricing strategies where “price is an indication of our values”.
  • Lucy Duncan (Green Street Meeting) & Susan Waltz: On the spiritual and practical journey of committing meeting resources to reparations.
  • Fran Brokaw: On the emotional hold of inherited money and the process of releasing it.
  • Aangoo Tucho (Friends Fiduciary): On how personal experiences with cruel regimes change the lens through which one views investing and finance.

• Nathan Kleban (Right Sharing of World Resources): Engaging people beyond financial donations.

• Traci Hjelt Sullivan (Right Sharing of World Resources): On overcoming “white saviorism” and the “clash of otherness” around class.
• Lisa Graustein: On money as a tool of power and the need to ensure it is used for healing rather than “power over”.

Resources and Recommendations

• From the Archives: “Wall Street, Main Street and Meeting House Road” (October 2012 Friends Journal).
• Tool of the Day: InvestYourValues.org. A website run by the nonprofit As You Sow that lets individuals and treasurers check whether their mutual funds or ETFs hold fossil fuels, weapons, or private prisons.

This Month’s Question

“What insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today?”

Share your thoughts:

• Voicemail: Call 317-QUAKERS (317-782-5377)
• Email: [email protected]
• Social Media: Respond on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

Sponsors

• Friends Fiduciary: Ethical investing through a Quaker lens.
• American Friends Service Committee (AFSC): Challenging injustice and building peace.

Next Month: We dive into relational finance and how we can share power and resources to build community.

 

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Transcript

Diana Yañez: Capitalism asks us to pretend that profit is the only thing that motivates any of us.

Peterson Toscano: The love of money is the root of all evil. And if you look at almost every ecological disaster, almost always it is because someone didn’t take responsibility to clean up the mess that they made.

Diana Yañez: I remember having this conversation with a venture capitalist about the runoff—when you’re having industrial waste and it goes into a river. And he looks at me with this kind of blank face and he’s like, “Those are externalities.” I wanted to scream.

Peterson Toscano: Welcome to a brand new season of Quakers Today. I’m Peterson Toscano. For the past five seasons, we’ve explored the intersections of faith, justice, and daily life. But this season, we’re going somewhere many of us, including Quakers, find a bit uncomfortable. We’re going into the wallet.

Diana Yañez: And I’m Diana Yañez. I’m a certified financial planner and a convinced Quaker. This season, Peterson and I are partnering to look at Quakers and money, not just as a matter of personal math, but as a spiritual practice and a communal responsibility.

Peterson Toscano: This is season six, episode one of the Quakers Today podcast, a project of Friends Publishing Corporation.

Diana Yañez: This season of Quakers Today is sponsored by Friends Fiduciary and the American Friends Service Committee.

Peterson Toscano: We’re calling this episode, “The Priesthood of All Believers, Economics”. You will hear a little bit about our own history with money, along with the four major themes we will explore this season.

Diana Yañez: You will also hear from some of the guests who appear in future episodes. For this series, we’ll look at how we manage our own lives, as well as how our meetings, churches, and nonprofits navigate the dissonance of living within a capitalist system.

Peterson Toscano: And we want you in on this conversation. So if you have a question about money, whether it’s a deep spiritual query or a practical hurdle, email us at [email protected] or leave a voicemail at 317-QUAKERS. I’ll have all these details and our show notes over at quakerstoday.org. Diana, you’re the expert here, thank goodness, but you didn’t start out wanting to be in finance, although that is your work these days. In fact, you once told me you thought finance was “gross.” So what changed for you?

Diana Yañez: My introduction to finance was back while I was in college. It was 2007 and all of these major corporations were getting bailed out because of the subprime mortgage crisis while my mom was actually going through a foreclosure. So I saw this huge dissonance between the experts and what I saw in my own community. And that just left me feeling like, “Finance? Gross”. However, over time, I realized that there was a way for me to work in this industry—for me to work in this field to create positive change and actually help people regardless of their level of wealth. And I had this drive in me, this calling to help people bridge the gap between their values, their security, and their money.

Peterson Toscano: Mmm. Well, my money biography also begins in college, but it’s different from yours. Decades ago, I worked for two of the richest companies in history, American Express and Exxon. But I wasn’t an executive. I had nothing to do with money. I was involved with food. I was a server. And every day I had to put on this white tuxedo with black trousers, and I served meals to the executives of these two companies and even to the board of directors. So people like Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford would show up. And I saw firsthand the big money that was involved in this. I saw the flowers flown in weekly from France, the Baccarat crystal, the china with gold all around it. And when I was done with that job in the morning and at lunchtime, I went uptown in New York City to work with youth at an after-school program, which was the job I really loved and was a job I would have done for free. So I saw this weird expense that was there just in the dining room and saw firsthand how money is a big deal for making money.

Diana Yañez: Yeah, it’s such a powerful vantage point, Peterson, and you experienced a tiny portion of the labor that makes all of this wealth possible.

Peterson Toscano: And it made me realize that even today as a freelance artist trying to live simply, I’m still connected to those systems. Now for you listening, when we talk about a priesthood of all believers economics, we’re saying we just can’t leave it to the high priests of Wall Street. You have a role. Every Friend has a role in discerning where the money goes. Diana, you’ve brought us voices from across the Quaker world, people who are currently and have been wrestling with these exact tensions.

Diana Yañez: That’s right. I’ve spoken with activists, treasurers, and historians. So let’s take a listen to a few of the perspectives we’ll be diving into this season.

Amy Carr: Part of the conversations I have with companies is not only representing Quaker values, but also the business case for the Quaker values. While I’m highlighting diversity conversations—it’s important to us, equality is important, having everyone represented is important. But also there are studies that show financial performance of diverse boards perform better. I’m toeing that line of making the business case and supporting positive financial performance, but also making the Quaker values case of why this is important to us and why this is better for society and the planet as a whole.

Douglas Tsoi: One of our basic beliefs was that no one should ever have to go into debt. And so I had four different tiers. And the basic idea is that you paid your hourly rate for that number of hours you were in class. If you made $15 an hour, the class would be 15 times 8—$120 for the class. But if you made $100 an hour, you paid $800 for the class. In terms of pricing strategy, it’s really effective. There’s a phrase that “price is an indication of quality”. For me, pricing was an indication of our values, right? So if I was saying anyone can come, that meant anyone can come.

Lucy Duncan: We were like, “Oh, we need to renovate our meeting house”. And there was a lot of concern about how much it would cost. And the trustees were like, “Oh, we have a $4 million unrestricted reserve over here. We can just pay for it out of that”. For many people, that was the first time we were like, “Wait, we have wealth? We have this money?” So we did do that. But we also were like, “We have this resource. We should do an investigation of where it came from, but also we should think about it as a spiritual resource”. The meeting decided to do $50,000 a year for 10 years towards reparations—to budget that much—and that the Black members of the meeting would be doing the discernment. And money would be devoted to reparations towards Black Germantown neighbors.

Susan Waltz: $7,000 is a lot of money for us. It represents about 10% of our annual budget. We didn’t know if we were going to be able to do it; it was quite a stretch. As the treasurer, I know that not all that many people have increased their giving to make that possible. When we recorded a minute and took the first decision, we avoided the discussion of whether it was annual or not. We kind of held our breath and we did it. Then once we did it the first year, we saw we could do it. And then we decided not only to do it the second year, but that we would make reparations payments every year.

Fran Brokaw: I think the first time I realized the emotional hold that money had on me was after my father and stepmother were on an airplane that crashed in the ocean. Everyone died. The co-pilot had locked the pilot out of the cabin and had intentionally crashed the plane in the ocean. My siblings and I sued the airline company and got a substantial settlement from them without them admitting that they had any fault. That money—it represented my father to me. It took a long time for me to let go of that sense. That crash was in 1999, so it was a long time ago. But after all the work I’d done, I was able to clearly see that money is money, but it’s not money that represents my father. It’s not my father. My father was the person who was never late for work, never late for dinner, never took even a pencil from his work. He lived by his ethics. My ethics did not include needing to hold on to that money any longer. And so releasing it feels good. It feels good.

Nathan Kleban: Some ​people ​just ​give, ​and ​that’s ​the ​extent ​of ​their ​engagement. ​We’re ​hoping ​to ​engage ​them ​in ​more ​and ​in ​different ​ways ​beyond ​just ​giving ​money ​or ​not ​even ​about ​giving ​money. ​But ​how ​do ​we ​look ​at ​our ​own ​lives ​and ​our ​own ​communities ​and ​our, ​um, ​own ​relationships? Where ​is ​transformation ​possible?

Aaangoo Tucho: There’s sometimes a blurred line between activist investing and what we do. Activist investing is when you decide on an ownership stake of a company for the sole purpose of engaging that company. We don’t just buy a company just to engage them. If we allow a company into our portfolios, it’s because they pass through all of our Quaker screens and they abide by our guidelines. When you grow up and you have firsthand experiences of your family members being affected by very cruel militaries and governments, it changes the way you think about the world. When you go into the world of investing and finance, you look at these companies who enable those sort of things with a different lens.

Ethan Birchard: There’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. I don’t know that performance and values are opposing ideas, but the second part of that quote doesn’t get referenced as much, and I like it. It says one should, for example, “be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise”.

Traci Hjelt Sullivan: There’s the spiritual part for us in the U.S. to do to accompany that, right? And it’s not just the spiritual part about money, which is big. It’s also the spiritual part about, “How do I start to overcome this sense of otherness, this huge clash of otherness that we experience around class?” And then it’s just exacerbated tenfold if you get into the global South. How can I get over my white saviorism and feel like I’m really doing this in partnership? When you look at Quaker history, you can always see how much contemporary culture was impacting what was happening in Quakerism, and sometimes we’re not really willing to see that.

Lisa Graustein: Some of the initial questions that people said were, “Well, how do we know they’re going to use it the right way?” And I was like, “That’s not the point. It’s not our money”. And that was not an idea that people could get on board with. Not everybody, but like a bunch of people were super resistant. They’re like, “Well, where’s the reporting back?” And I was like, “No, it’s not ours to use as a tool of power”. And I think that’s the conversation that often doesn’t happen among Friends is money is a tool of power in our existing systems. And so if we’re not talking about how we’re using money in this moment as a tool of power to make sure that it’s a “power with” or a “power of healing,” it’s too easy to fall into money as a tool of “power over”.

Diana Yañez: You just heard Amy Carr from Friends Fiduciary, Douglas Tsoi, Lucy Duncan from Green Street Meeting and Reparations Works, Nathan Kleban, Susan Waltz, Fran Brokaw, Aangoo Tucho from Friends Fiduciary, Ethan Birchard from Friends Fiduciary, Traci Hjelt Sullivan from Right Sharing of World Resources, and Lisa Graustein.

Peterson Toscano: So over the next five episodes, they’ll be joining us to talk about everything from reparations to how a meeting’s investment portfolio can actually promote peace. In each episode of this series, Quakers and Money, we’re going to look at a resource from the Friends Journal archives. Diana, you picked one out for us today.

Diana Yañez: I did. It’s from the October 2012 issue: “Wall Street, Main Street and Meeting House Road”. Even back then, Friends were asking, “How do we stay honest in a system that often rewards the opposite?” Our struggle with integrity and capitalism isn’t new. It’s a perennial Quaker query.

Peterson Toscano: We also like to offer a recommendation. So for those listening who want to take a step toward that integrity today, what’s a tool you recommend?

Diana Yañez: I highly recommend the website InvestYourValues.org. It’s run by the nonprofit As You Sow, and you can go into that website and type in the name of a mutual fund—anything that you might hold in your retirement plan—and it’ll show you exactly what’s inside of that mutual fund or ETF, whether that’s fossil fuels, weapons, private prisons, or companies with poor gender equality. It’s a great tool for individuals, but it’s especially powerful for meeting treasurers who want to make sure the meeting’s house is in order.

Peterson Toscano: We have links to the Friends Journal article and the Invest Your Values website on our website; visit QuakersToday.org. Before we go, a quick reminder: Diana and I are here to explore the spiritual and systemic side of finance. We are not your stockbrokers or tax accountants, especially me. Please don’t trust me with your money. This show is for educational and exploratory purposes—non-specific financial or investment advice.

Diana Yañez: However, we do want to help you explore. So send us those questions, whether you’re wondering how to talk to your meeting about reparations or how to align your small business with the testimony of integrity. And remember, whatever we discuss on the show is not investment advice.

Peterson Toscano: Thank you for listening and watching this episode of Quakers Today. Season six of Quakers Today is sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. The American Friends Service Committee works at the forefront of social change to meet urgent needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.

Diana Yañez: Season 6 of Quakers Today is 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. Friends Fiduciary blends Quaker values with smart, mission-driven investing. Learn more at friendsfiduciary.org.

Peterson Toscano: What’s coming up? Well, next month we’re diving into relational finance. How can we share power and resources in a way that builds community?

Diana Yañez: So let’s look at those so-called externalities together.

Peterson Toscano: Until next time, walk gently and be mindful of the paths your money takes.

Peterson Toscano: Here is the question we are asking listeners: What insights or practices guide your relationship with finance today? Share your thoughts! Leave a voicemail: Call 317-QUAKERS (317-782-5377). Email us: [email protected]. Social Media: Respond on Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok.

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Disclosure: Diana Gisel Yañez is an Investment Advisor Representative of Natural Investments PBLLC. Natural Investments is an independent Registered Investment Advisor. Quakers Today and Friends Journal are not a registered entity and are not an affiliate or subsidiary of Natural Investments. See our Disclosures and Disclaimers and read our Form CRS.