About Us: The Journey to a Wellbeing Economy
This blog chronicles our journey—Katie and Brian Boland's—to understand and help build a new kind of economy. For years, we have sought to understand why, in a world of unprecedented wealth, we witness explosive GDP growth while many people feel financially overwhelmed. Why do we have the global resources to solve our greatest challenges, yet the systems in place seem to make things worse?
The answer we’ve arrived at is both simple and radical: the prevailing economic system is not broken; it is working exactly as it was designed. It was built to prioritize profit over people, to concentrate wealth, and to treat human communities and the natural world as resources to be extracted.
But the economy is not a force of nature. It is a human-made construct, a set of rules and agreements that we collectively choose to live by. And because we created it, we have the power to create a new one—an economy designed not for extraction, but for well-being.
This space is where we will share what we are learning as we deploy our own capital to help build that new system. We will explore the ideas and models that give us hope, including:
- Dismantling the Growth Imperative: We will challenge the dogma of endless economic growth and explore post-growth frameworks, like Doughnut Economics, that aim for a world where everyone’s needs are met within the limits of our planet.
- Redefining "Return": We reject the false choice between financial return and social good. This blog will deconstruct the violence of "market-rate returns" and advocate for a more holistic, integrated approach that simultaneously builds financial, social, and natural capital.
- Shifting Ownership & Power: We believe lasting change is community-led and that ownership and stewardship are key to building an equitable economy. We will highlight transformative models, such as employee ownership, community land trusts, and other forms of democratic stewardship, that build broad-based wealth and power.
Our goal is to challenge the conventional wisdom of finance and investing, moving the conversation from flawed, incremental solutions like ESG and impact investing toward the systemic change required to build a just, equitable, and sustainable future.
Who We Are
We are Katie and Brian Boland, the co-founders of The Delta Fund, an initiative where we invest our capital to advance racial equity, financial inclusion, and a post-growth future.
Katie is a former educator and has served on several nonprofit boards. Brian is a former Vice President at Facebook who has turned whistleblower and now serves on several boards. They focus their work on building a more just and equitable economic system.
We live in Bellevue, WA, with our two children. We invite you to join us in this conversation and work together as we build the world our children and we deserve. You are the only expert in your values, and we believe that you should lean into them.