Photo & Editing by KK Ottesen.
Justin “Chester” White, heads LTMA Capital, a blended debt and venture fund advancing human rights and gender equality. LTMA (Less Talk, More Action), believes balancing financial returns with societal benefits empowers people and facilitates future reinvestment. Chester also owns Main Line Social, a forthcoming restaurant and community event space in Carbondale, Colorado, which has committed to exclusively serving women-owned beers, wines, and spirits, and being a best-in-class employer.
Prior to founding LTMA Capital and Main Line Social, Chester served as Manager of Human Rights and Gender Equality at Mars, Inc. In that role, he advised business segments on efforts that reduce human rights risks across supply chains including palm oil, mint, sugarcane, and rice. He led a new human rights due diligence approach for carbon offsets and worked to increase focus on social co-benefits in the carbon market.
Chester joined Terra Alpha’s Advisory Board earlier this year, bringing valuable perspectives to the board, including work experience at a global multinational corporation, a focus on social/labor issues, and a more youthful viewpoint.
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I love the name LTMA – Less Talk, More Action. Can you talk about how you got into the work and how you’ve woven the threads of your background together?
Absolutely. I was a trained elementary school educator. That was my first formal foray into the world of social justice and of understanding the difference that we can make in the world with what we choose to do for work. I had the privilege of teaching in San Francisco, and then in Costa Rica. And while I was teaching, I became fixated – and this seems to be a thread with a lot of people who work in corporate sustainability – on impact at scale. I looked at the class of 23 students and felt I was making a difference in their lives, but what would it mean to make a difference in thousands of people’s lives all at once?
So I went back to school, I went to the United Nations University for Peace, which is down in Costa Rica, and got a degree in responsible management and sustainable economic development. That led me to this opportunity to work on issues of social justice at Mars, and I got sucked in.
What was it that hooked you?
I guess two things: the brain exercise of dealing with deeply entrenched societal issues that have been decades in the making and working to unravel what’s been done, and the opportunity to travel the world – spending time in Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Latin America – with folks participating in programs that you’re working on. And even if you get to meet a community leader or a woman participating in a village lending program for 20 minutes, or five minutes, it’s really impactful to see the effect that your work is having on people’s lives.
Do you have particular examples that stay with you?
One of my first field visits was to Côte d’Ivoire in really rural towns. In Côte d’Ivoire and in Ghana, Mars partners there with CARE Impact Partners on a really large-scale village savings and loans program, village-based microlending. Women in the community participate by pooling money into this local fund, and then they can draw loans and pay back at very preferable interest rates.
It was one of the coolest experiences in my life to sit and watch one of these meetings play out. There’s the leader who takes roll call, and then they’re counting the cash in their box, and then there’s the request for distribution or request for loan, and then there’s repayment of loans. Knowing that there are thousands of these throughout West Africa, and seeing one governed so perfectly, and then talking to these folks and understanding, okay, well, this enabled you to invest in a chicken coop and buy your first round of hens which are now producing eggs, and you’re now selling them to other women – seeing it really work was special.
Then in Thailand, we were doing work on fishing vessels, because there are instances in the international Thai fish supply chain of forced labor, an industry-wide issue. And there, it was interesting to see maybe what wasn’t working so well. Where a kind gentleman, who’s a migrant laborer, didn’t speak any English, but was pointing at my boss and me to look at something. And to see the shift boss just berate this man, it was clear to us that this guy had essentially no working rights, and was highly marginalized and subject to the whims of a shift boss. That was kind of eye-opening, too.
Did that give you any ideas as to how to help empower people?
Yes, that issue of forced labor really comes down to recruitment fees, which are an international migrant labor epidemic. Mostly young men, but in some sectors, young women, are recruited from low-income countries – Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia – to work in specific sectors. In order to get those jobs, they pay middlemen tremendous fees that indebt them. So, when they show up to work, they are paying off debts.
I was very privileged to be part of one of the largest voluntary repayments of recruitment fees in history, something to the effect of $7 million got paid out to 3,000 palm oil plantation workers. Mars paid that to the supplier, who then paid it. It was directly solving the issue because you now have all these workers freed from debt bondage and was an instance where a CPG [consumer packaged goods] brand paid more than their fair share. People say supply chains are broken, but the reality is they’re working exactly how they were designed to work. So it’s not about fixing something broken, it’s how do we take it from the top and build something from scratch that is designed to work for everybody along the value chain?
You decided to move on from that work – how did you come to that decision?
Throughout my time at Mars I had been exposed to a lot of really good, innovative ideas in the venture space, and in the private debt space. But Mars was really not the right home for them. I wanted to take those ideas outside of Mars and run with them. So, having worked as a manager of human rights and gender equality at Mars, I started this venture and debt fund designed specifically to target gender inequality and human rights risks.
I talked earlier about recruitment fees, and how they result in debt and workers being exposed to risks of excessive working hours, document retention, and hazardous work conditions. So now a group of thought leaders, technical experts, and I have been kicking around the idea of a private debt scheme designed to resolve this issue. We, as lenders, would go to a palm oil plantation, or a fishery, or a farm that has identified issues of debt bondage, and provide them a loan at a highly preferable interest rate, 2% or 3%. They would immediately take all the cash that we’ve lent them and repay all the creditors, and then would recuperate that money to pay back the loan by entering into an agreement with the retailer or the customer facing seller, who would agree to a margin cut for this product that is now slave free.
A consumer goods company is not going to do something quite this innovative because it sits far outside of their core business and core capabilities. But for an impact investor, it is a perfect opportunity. There aren’t many impact investments where you can say, there are now 3,000 people not working under conditions of forced labor where there were before.
The good thing is that now we’re seeing regulatory pressure that’s going to require people to solve this problem. Our pitch to these folks is: You can get ahead of that, we can solve it today. Or, you will have to solve it in a more expensive fashion in two years. So, we’re working to chip away at that.
And then, there’s a lot in the gender space that’s coming to life through our venture work pursuing venture deals. We’ve made investments in women’s sports, women’s outdoor apparel, and female-farmer-focused consumer brands. Everything from technology that helps enable women in East Africa to get loans, to reproductive health and rights. Right now, I’m looking at seaweed farming that helps empower women who live in coastal communities. I am constantly on the road trying to find new interesting things.
What sort of lessons learned do you share with others interested in being effective in this space?
The primary thing for me is coming at this from a technical-expert perspective. I haven’t tried to enter into a world of investing that I’m not familiar with. I’m not getting into carbon credits or bonds. I’m coming at this with the passion for social impact and experience in corporate sustainability that allows me to lean on my network, my experience knowing what works and what’s not going to work, where you’re going to flush money down the toilet, or where you can actually make an impact in people’s lives. And knowing that distinction takes some experience.
I’m also trying to bring to life all of these things that we’re working on through venture and debt now through an actual operating business, a restaurant, Main Line Social. That includes our drink program, beer, wines, and spirits, all coming from women-owned breweries, vineyards, and distilleries. We are thinking critically about things like healthcare and benefits for a sector that traditionally is relatively exploitative; we are thinking about engaging the community. I think about it as a gathering place. We want everybody to feel like they have a home there.
A fifth generation Mars family member, you clearly have a strong motivation to do this social impact work. Where does that come from, do you think? Did you have early examples in your life?
I think having strong role models in the home was step one. My parents have been philanthropists as long as I can remember, and have engaged on issues of girls’ education, environmental stewardship, all these things. And that is something that I hope to do for my kids, as well.
The second, is that being a member of the Mars family, we have what we call the five principles that govern how we expect associates to come to work every day. They include things like responsibility, equality, freedom. But the one that sticks out to me, and many family members will say this is what makes Mars unique, is this concept of mutuality, this concept that shared benefits endure. It is ingrained in how Mars does business, how we treat our business partners, and how we invest in our associates. It’s something that we as a family, both a nuclear family and extended families, hold dearly to our hearts, and makes how we operate as a family business unique. It also makes how we operate as individuals outside the business every day unique, as well.
This concept of mutuality has resonated with me for so long and has been a guiding pillar for how I could use my platform as a Mars family member, how I can use my assets for good, and how I can leverage my network and friendships to help create the world we want tomorrow.
If you could snap your fingers and will something into being, what would it be?
It’s a great question. What I would love is for everybody around the world – rich, poor, America, Global South, it doesn’t matter – to understand that impact begins anytime you have a dollar to spend, and understand that you can choose to spend that dollar in a number of ways.
And that comes down to, if you are ultra-wealthy and have a million dollars to give to charity, how you allocate that. All the way down to someone who’s just buying groceries and has a dollar to spend on tomatoes – do you want to get the tomatoes from the grocery store or from the farmer’s market? Just that choice in itself I like, because it means that the idea of impact isn’t reserved for those in positions of privilege and power. Impact belongs to us, globally, and anybody that has a dollar to spend can choose to put that dollar to good use. That would be the dream state.
What are things you worry about – existential issues or just obstacles in trying to move forward?
The primary concern I have about society at large is that we have been spoiled with how things have been priced for too long, so we expect to have cheap produce, and cheap five-bedroom houses, and cheap cars, and free gas. We put pressure on businesses to make the goods that we want as cheaply as possible. And businesses cut corners on labor costs, and quality, and environmental standards to make that happen. And recalibrating society’s appetite for all this stuff is a huge challenge. So what concerns me is the reality of how things are going to be priced in the future with internalized externalities, like carbon emissions and pollution.
How did you come to know Terra Alpha and decide to get involved?
My wife and I wanted to get into Terra Alpha because we knew they had a new approach for sustainable investing, and applying this creative proprietary lens onto publicly traded equities that no one else was doing with such vigor. The fund’s current focus is environmental impact. In joining the advisory board, what they’ve tapped me to think about is what’s the theory of change for including a social lens on these investments as well? Is there an investment benefit and a long-term return benefit for investors in public equities for firms that invest in people? Does a commitment to living wage for your employees result in better shareholder return over time? What about supply chain due diligence and not having poverty in the extended supply chain or a reliance on forced labor? This broad swath of social issues where the academic work is a little bit mixed. I think we’re going to be part of proving that, over time, investments in people, both in-house, with your suppliers, and into the extended supply chain, do result in better shareholder returns.
Finally, what is advice you live by?
If you’re able to do what you love, you’ll find a way to make a difference.