Meet Stephanie Brobbey, a lawyer with an epiphany and a vision to rise against the wealth machine.
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Stephanie Brobbey, a lawyer and now a social entrepreneur.
Stephanie Brobbey spent the last decade helping the rich get richer – now, she’s about to launch the UK’s first advisory firm that would help the wealthy redistribute their money and build a more egalitarian economic system.
The Good Ancestor Movement is the brainchild of Brobbey, who spent a decade as a lawyer advising the rich on how to become richer. However, a few years ago, she had an epiphany upon realizing that the UK has more food banks than McDonald’s outlets.
“When I qualified [as a lawyer], I got involved in philanthropic communities, I sat on boards, so I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m, like, really in touch with these issues’. And then, when my friend told me about the food banks, I thought, ‘Wow, how can I live in the world’s fifth most advanced economy and be okay with that?’”
Brobbey quit, reset, and reinvented herself as a wealth manager for her organization, whose mission is to help people with wealth aplenty to better direct their resources. According to the organization’s mission, “better” entails “(a) knowing when enough is enough, and (b) resolving how to use it to help build a new, fairer, less exploitative economic system.”
The lawyer devised a three-month-long course full of radical lectures and debates, including topics regarding Western imperialism and slavery, in addition to reparations and divestment.
“It’s the first time they’ll be meeting like-minded people and able to have a chance to discuss some of the discomfort that they feel around their wealth and the enormous responsibility that they feel to right wrongs in the world,” said Brobbey.
Questions come up during the process: Do you really need the Ferrari? Could your portfolio get a little trimming?
“They are not divesting themselves of everything,” says Brobbey. “They’re just choosing no longer to participate in extreme wealth.”
It is not that Brobbey is doing philanthropic work, but the issue has rather much to do with tackling wealth inequality and capitalistic indoctrination that one must accumulate wealth, a behavior that harms people and the environment.
“We totally see ourselves as part of an ecosystem [and] our hope is that the mainstream industry will start to embed some of our practices in their own work,” she said.
Brobbey expresses that she is currently content with the small wins and progresses she is making, sparking up conversation about the aggression of capitalism.
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