Mark Watson spent 30 years in corporate and public finance. Several years ago, he started consulting for the Fair Food Network and Boston Impact Initiative and started seeing significant gaps in how most impact investing wasn't moving the needle on the impact they claimed they wanted to see. For example only one Black Farmer amongst many -- despite the program being about racial equity.
In response, Mark started Potlikker Capital - https://www.potlikkercapital.com/ - as an integrator. Where other lenders' credit boxes prevent them from extending access to capital (especially to BIPOC farmers), Potlikker seeks to fill in the gaps, and organize capital stewards to see the transformation they could be about -- when there is a "Market Administrator" that sits in the middle and helps all parties stay focused on the core outcomes they're most trying to achieve.
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Potlikker Capital is a farm community governed charitable integrated capital fund created to holistically serve BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) farmers in America who operate at the intersection of racial and climate justice.
Mark Watson is Co-founder and President of Potlikker Capital, a farm community governed charitable integrated capital fund dedicated to supporting BIPOC farmers at the intersection of racial and climate justice. Potlikker Capital is a supporting entity to Jubilee Justice. He also serves as Senior Investment Strategist, after serving as Managing Director of the Fair Food Fund, which offers catalytic capital with a social equity lens to improve community access to healthy food and increase wealth through more local ownership of the means of the production and distribution of food. He is also the founder of Keel Asset Management LLC, a financial advisory firm that provides socially responsible financial planning and investment advisory services to nonprofits, public and corporation pension plans. Mr. Watson started his career as a banker at the First National Bank of Chicago, now JP Morgan in commercial banking, corporate and public finance. He had a 30-year career which included managing investment portfolios for foundations, endowments, and institutional pensions funds. Most recently, Mr. Watson co-designed and launched an integrated racial justice capital fund, The Boston Impact Initiative Fund and managed the deployment of capital to over 30 small businesses. Mark continues as an investment committee member of the Boston Impact Initiative Fund; an advisory board Member of MIT/Health Innovation Systems Inc.; Director of Transition of The Institute of Educational Leadership; board president of Sustainable Cape, Inc.; and a former board member of the Social Venture Network. Mr. Watson holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance, University of Illinois Champaign -Urbana and a Master’s in Business Administration, The Booth School, University of Chicago.