Meet an innoFaither is our new series to introduce the inspiring optimists in the innoFaith world and what they’re working on and thinking about. We hope it helps you find and engage with each other across the network to advance faith-rooted social innovation and interfaith collaboration for social impact. Or just meet some cool people.
Meet the incomparable Rosa Lee Harden, Episcopal priest out of the deep south who created what has become the go-to convening in the impact investing* field - SOCAP (Social Capital Markets) - and now is turning her energy to launching Faith + Finance,** a new event in the same vein, but this time with theology.
What faith, if any, do you practice?
I was raised in the deep south, in Mississippi, and Christianity was deeply bred into my bones. I attended seminary as a Baptist right out of college before anyone was ordaining women to be pastors. In my early 40s, I became an Episcopalian and headed to seminary AGAIN and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1999.
Where do you live?
In 2011 my husband, Kevin Jones, and I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, from San Francisco, to be close to our two children and grandchildren.
What's your favorite pastime?
I have three passions, very disparate: gardening, which I am not doing much of these days; swimming, and I’m headed to Hawaii on vacation SOON!; and strangely enough, marching band or drum corps. I’m deeply involved with the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps, a summer youth program for college-aged musicians headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
What are you working on currently?
I’m currently building the team to launch a new event called Faith + Finance: Reimagining God’s Economy. After launching SOCAP a dozen years ago, I am going back to my roots and asking those same kinds of questions about entrepreneurship and impact investing, but this time with a particularly theological lens.
What question are you thinking about these days?
Thinking back to the very first SOCAP (2008) when Katherine Fulton said in her keynote that the social capital market was arising in a response to a moral hunger, I now wonder how the church’s lack of leadership about the ethical use of money led to the lack of morality in the market. For all of my life, the church has said it’s not polite to talk about money (other than stewardship for the support of the church), and we have faithful folks in all denominations and faiths who completely separate the way they follow the teachings of their faith about how they live their lives and what they do with their money.
I believe our faith should not just speak to how much money we give to good endeavors, but also impact what we buy and who we buy it from, what we invest any savings in, what we drive, how we travel, and innumerable other decisions we make with money every day.
Where can folks find you?
*Not sure what impact investing is? See our previous posts here and here.
**Use promo code “innoFaith” to get $100 off the Early-ish Bird pricing for Faith + Finance through February 29.