Antidote to Autocracy — A Playbook for Impact Responses

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Antidote to Autocracy — Conversations with Jed Emerson (Program 2 of 2)

Personal praxis, institutional strategy, and capital design in an age of polarization.

Program overview
After the wake-up comes the work. Building on Session 1 of our two-program exploration and inspired by a new series of Substack posts, Jed Emerson shifts from diagnosis to design — offering a practical framework for how individuals, organizations, and capital allocators can respond with integrity and impact. We’ll outline an action agenda that integrates personal practice and civic engagement with institutional governance, investment theses, blended-finance tools, and narrative strategy. The goal: move beyond another fund launch or conference panel to architectures that reduce friction, expand access, and protect democratic capacity — so mission can actually move in the real world.

Topics covered

• Personal praxis: roles, boundaries, resilience, and “showing up” with clarity
• Organizational readiness: governance, risk mapping, policy exposure, and mission integrity
• Capital architecture: catalytic stacks, contingency planning, and deployment in contested environments
• Place-based execution: designing country/region platforms that lower transaction costs and build local capacity
• Narrative & media strategy: reaching audiences outside the impact echo chamber
• Community challenges: field-level collaboration, resource sharing, and rapid-learning loops

Featured Guest

Jed Emerson is a pioneer of purpose-driven capital with 30+ years in the field. Co-author of the first book on impact investing — and seven others on impact and social entrepreneurship — he founded Blended Value Group, advising investment firms, funds, family offices, and foundations on strategy and execution. In the late 1990s he coined “blended value,” the now-influential idea that social, environmental, and economic value are inseparable; his book The Purpose of Capital explores aligning wealth and purpose across generations. Emerson serves as Senior Strategic Advisor at AlTi Tiedemann Global and Senior Fellow at ImpactAssets; he advises Happiness Capital and sits on the board of the Katapult Foundation. He is a Senior Fellow with the University of Zurich’s Blended Finance Initiative and a Senior Research Fellow at Heidelberg University’s Center on Social Investing, and has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, with teaching roles at Kellogg and NYU–Abu Dhabi. Earlier, he helped found REDF and Larkin Street Youth Services.