Prophets of Healing

Brett Hagler is in the foundations business.

Coming out of Y-Combinator in 2014, Brett and his co-founders were staring at the global housing crisis and imagining a better way to solve it than the typical charity playbook. So, they founded New Story.

New Story focuses their work in Latin America, where roughly 70% of the adult population is unbanked and cannot access affordable housing loans. Through innovative programs that they developed, New Story subverts the traditional model of home selling, lending, and buying. This new “housing market” not only creates an entry point into affordable and sustainable housing but also a pathway towards generational wealth.

Brett recently joined Whiteboard during a team meeting to discuss New Story’s future. Brett told us that in 2025, New Story is not so much worried about getting bigger but, instead, getting better. “Better things grow,” he said.

Brett builds foundations for homes, of course, but he also builds a foundation for future generations to inherit an asset. And now Brett is doing some foundational thinking by focusing on better over bigger.

Sometimes scale runs deep, not wide.

The end of the year and the beginning of a new one are both a time of reflection and anticipation. We reflect on the past year’s learnings and successes while imagining a future as we plan for the coming year. It’s an interesting intersection of time to have the past and future so clearly marked by the calendar.

Every year during this season, I find myself inside the pages of poet-farmer Wendell Berry. In a culture — and an industry — that elevates the new and the youthful and the latest and hottest, it’s a centering exercise to sit in the wisdom of someone whose ideas are not new but still very much counter-cultural. And from someone whose perspective was shaped just as much by what he chose not to do with his life than what he did do.

I found a New York Times article from 1977 that described Berry as “a prophet of our healing.” I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think it ties in nicely with why we do what we do at Whiteboard. It would be beautiful if one day someone described Whiteboard as “prophets of healing” or maybe even “prophets of repairing.” That is to say that our work is such that — no matter who it’s for — in some way, it leaves the world better than when we got here.

Berry talks a lot about the economy. I think that his views on economic health are one way he believes healing can happen. His agrarian and communal view of life based on stewardship, kinship, contentment, and co-laboring gives an imagination for how a business can operate in a healing way.

Much of what Berry believes can be summarized as what is called an “economics of mutuality.” This way of thinking is based on a set of ideas that ensures that all stakeholders flourish, not only the shareholders. At our core, we also believe in these same ideas at Whiteboard.

This belief means that we are both trying to run a business that is inherently bound by the rules that govern the institution of business (like making money) while also using business as a tool for healing through how we work and what we work on. All inside a mindset of mutuality that influences how we steward our money.

None of these ideas are typically found inside this particular institution and so our way of thinking requires a keen sense of imagination formed by asking a different set of questions and making a different set of assumptions about the world.

Berry once stated, “If you want to make money for a year, you will ask certain questions. But if you want to make money for 100 years, you will have to ask other questions.”

Whiteboard wants to go on creating impact for as long as possible, one hundred years even. And to do that in a generative way that forces others in our space to ask the same types of questions with the same type of imagination.

This takes us to Whiteboard’s foundational thinking.

We believe that how we build Whiteboard is just as important as what Whiteboard makes.

This means we want to build a foundation that can bring to life a different type of economy. That is why we have framed our foundational thinking with language and ideas and structures like “meaningful over meaningless” and “redemptive entrepreneurship” and “B Corp.”

Our foundation needs to carry a lot of weight if it is to hold those types of ideas. And we recognize that building something this strong won’t be super glamorous. It won’t be too caught up in trends, and it likely won’t show a hockey stick graph of success. Instead, we are plotting something more akin to Nitzsche’s famous “long obedience in the same direction.”

And this same idea applies to how we do our work. It’s a healing act to truly listen to someone. It’s a healing act to see someone else’s perspective and to represent it inside of a project. It’s a healing act to create a safe space for a client or co-worker when their project creates uncertainty.

And, of course, sometimes the output of the work itself is healing, like when we work with TED’s Audacious Project, which launches and funds big ideas aimed at solving the world’s most urgent challenges. Or Walk With, a digital product that equips parents to be better parents. Or a local Chattanooga initiative to increase the awareness of the importance of early childhood education.

As I reflect on how we work at Whiteboard and what we work on, I’m reminded of what a fading Irish rock star once said. He said that he sees his work as a way to “tear a little corner off of the darkness.” Whiteboard also tears a little bit of the corner.

How do you think about your work? Maybe you run spreadsheets that track profitability or are in the middle of a fundraising round. Or, maybe you develop strategies to increase market share and gain new customers. Maybe you keep projects on time. Or perhaps you design digital experiences. It doesn’t matter because what you do isn’t that.

What you actually do — if you can imagine it and embrace it — is you tear off corners of darkness and you let light into the world. This is not specific to working at a non-profit or a positive impact company, or an agency like Whiteboard. This is specific to a way of seeing the world and being in the world.

And so, as we start a new year, I’d encourage us all to spend a few minutes thinking through our work. Like Brett at New Story, how can we imagine different systems that repair? How can we build strong foundations for growth? How can we imagine scale as something that goes more deep, more local maybe, than it does wide?

Can 2025 be a year of healing work that tears off a little corner of the darkness?

I think so.