Future Capital Initiative

As part of WAAS’ initiative in the field of money, finance and economics, it is partnering with the Future Capital Initiative (FCI), a group of global thought and action leaders drawn from business and finance, arts and sciences, academia, and world wisdom traditions. FCI seeks to activate the power at the nexus of human values, consciousness and capital to mobilize investment capital as a creative force to accelerate global social transformation that promotes human wellbeing. A principal objective of FCI is to support and accelerate existing transformation initiatives while also identifying and promoting new and emergent initiatives aimed at improving the quality and speed of implementation of the UN SDGs.

The inaugural gathering of 50 founding members of the Future Capital Initiative was held at the United Nations in New York, September 12–13, 2019, in collaboration with WAAS, the UN Office of Partnerships, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

The inaugural meeting was convened by the Chairman of FCI, Lawrence Ford, recently nominated as Fellow of WAAS, and 13 other members of the FCI Design Team, which includes Garry Jacobs, Frank Dixon and Mila Popovich. The Founder’s Report contains a statement of objectives, principles and a list of Design Team and founding FCI members.

The New York conference was quickly followed by two WAAS-organized events at World Bank in Washington the following week and Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik in November 2019, the Global Leaders Forum at Seoul later that month and the World Sustainable Development Forum in Mexico in early March 2020.

These meetings are preparatory to an FCI summit at the UN in New York on September 10-11, 2020, in which 200 financial experts, socially-conscious investment advisers, and others strongly committed to conscious use of capital for human wellbeing. The aim of the summit will be to expand the network of participating individuals and organizations and build momentum for a social movement to redirect the world’s financial resources to implement the SDGs and accelerate change toward an inclusive, equitable and sustainable global financial system. 

FCI is also one of more than 20 WAAS partners on the Academy’s project with the UN in Geneva on Global Leadership in the 21st century. FCI will present findings, conclusions and recommendations on global financial transformation at the Geneva Conference scheduled for October 27-28, 2020.

In order to capitalize on the insights drawn from these meetings and the vast experience of its founding members, FCI has also created a number of working groups in which WAAS is actively collaborating on core issues related to development investing and impact measurement, support and accelerate the implementation of the SDGs, raise the level of consciousness of business and political leaders, and transform global education.

WAAS’ partnership with FCI and other catalytic initiatives to follow are part of its on-going effort to promote integrated, value-based, human-centered, new economic theory and policy at the global level.