Our Story

Our History

Activest’s work started in 2015, following Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri. We began our research on the racial- justice implications of the credit rating agencies’ downgrading of Ferguson’s bonds. We found that the city wouldn’t be able to pay for the mounting class-action lawsuits and also cover its existing operating costs and debt service due to the police department’s violent military-style response to protestors and, the ensuring reforms required by the Department of Justice’s consent decree with the Ferguson police, while covering its existing operating costs and debt service. We knew there were other Fergusons out there, and that the market could be wielded as a tool to uncover those cities and hold them accountable. This insight became the thesis that grew into Activest.

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Advancing Fiscal Justice 

Racial injustice in U.S. cities is built on a long history of troubling financial practices. Municipal budgets often serve as the supply lines to fueling state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded racial oppression. U.S. cities annually lose $70 billion in corporate tax giveaways, $11 billion from exclusionary school discipline policies, and $2 billion for municipal settlements, while bringing in $7 billion in predatory revenue from excessive fines and fees — all disproportionately harming BIPOC communities. 

Municipal finance experts have demonstrated that a handful of financial indicators can predict over 95% of local government fiscal health, specifically the local economy, tax base, fund balances, debt profile, and pension obligations. Yet absent are local government’s extra-financial and off-balance-sheet policies and practices across core city functions including criminal justice, economic development, public health, education, water, or climate change. 

Rating agencies are just starting to consider how social unrest and economic inequality are indicators of and accelerants to fiscal decline. For example, Moody’s considers climate change as having created the broad based conditions for increased financial risk, while extreme weather events are considered the specific, unpredictable, destabilizing events that actually result in massive losses. Similarly, social and economic equality in cities have created the conditions for increased risk, while police brutality, police settlements and the often ensuring social unrest are the specific, unpredictable, destabilizing, costly events that result from inequality. 

In short, racism is costly and inequity is expensive. Many of the very practices that rating agencies and investors reward actually erode the tax base, lead to fatal police encounters, and are early indicators of city-wide social unrest. 

Watch to discover more about the Activest story.


Who We Are

Activest is an investment research and analytics firm led by social scientists, policy analysts, and public finance practitioners.

Micah Gilmer

Micah Gilmer

Micah helps teams reach their full potential by turning equity values into courageous leadership. He is a co-founder of Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm dedicated to making the world a more just place for all. In that role, he has led work in partnership with dynamic non-profit organizations as well as institutional philanthropy. In June, he finished a 16 month shift as interim CEO for the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, a funder supporting racial equity and power building across eleven states in the Southeast US. He served as the founding board chair of Activest, and stepped into the CEO role in 2023.

Napoleon Wallace

Napoleon Wallace

Napoleon Wallace is a Co-Founder with Activest. Most recently Napoleon was the Deputy Secretary of Commerce for North Carolina. Previously he was a Social Investment Officer at the Kresge Foundation, and also served as a high yield bond analyst at Wells Fargo. He has an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Homero Radway

Homero Radway

Homero is a Senior Analyst with Activest. He has 20 years of financial experience connecting people through stories and communities with capital. His recent financial experience includes Managing Director at Neighborly. He has also worked at JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price, Credit Suisse, and Lehman Brothers. Homero has an MBA from Georgetown University and BS from Cornell University.

Ellen Ward

Ellen Ward

Ellen is a Senior Strategist with Activest. She began her career in community development finance at SunTrust Bank and transitioned to public policy for the State of Massachusetts. Most recently she was Chief of Staff at Living Cities. She has a Master in City Planning degree from MIT.

Shruti Shah

Shruti Shah

Shruti Shah is the COO of Activest. She is also an advisor, investor, and coach to a handful of growing companies and an Entrepreneur in Residence at Nike. She was previously the co-founder and COO of Y Combinator backed Move Loot. Over the course of three years, she and her co-founding team raised $22 million dollars. Shruti was honored by Forbes as a 2016 30 Under 30 recipient in Retail and E-Commerce and the Aspen Institute as an Aspen Ideas Festival Scholar in reimagining capitalism. Prior to co-founding Move Loot, Shruti worked for the New Schools Venture Seed Fund, a seed fund that invests in early-stage education technology companies, and she was also a public school teacher in Baltimore.

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