In this episode of Be and Think in the House of Trust, Servane listens to Donna Morton, Finance Futurist, Movements Weaver, Serial Social Entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Bio Regional Fund "Salmon Returns". 

Journey with us and discover:

The Salmon’s Journey as Metaphor:

Donna shares her 40-year journey, drawing inspiration from the salmon’s return to ancestral streams. She explores how this natural cycle mirrors the need to return finance to its roots—serving life, community, and regeneration.

Money as Medicine:

Donna explains how we can use finance as a tool for healing rather than extraction.

Reweaving Wealth:

The conversation highlights ancient Indigenous practices, such as the potlatch, where wealth is redistributed and blankets are torn and rewoven, a metaphor for reimagining and reconstructing financial systems.

Poetry and Ceremony in Finance:

Donna introduces the idea of treating financial work as poetry or prayer. We can inject emotion, ceremony, and deep democracy. She reads a poetic reflection on money as a current that must flow in harmony with the land.

Nine Sacred Principles:

The episode explores nine guiding principles—dignity, justice, stewardship, democracy, intergenerational responsibility, community, wealth and well-being, cultural flourishing, ecological economics, and radical truth—plus nine ways of “togetherness,” from collaboration to coexistence.

Conflict and Harmony:

Drawing from salmon culture, Donna reflects on service, sacrifice, and the wisdom of nature in navigating conflict and fostering collective healing.

Personal Regeneration:

Donna recounts her recovery from a CO2-induced coma. She draws a parallel her personal healing with the Earth’s capacity for regeneration. She advocates for aligning finance with life and listening to the wisdom of Indigenous communities.

Embodied Leadership:

The episode closes with insights on listening to the body, embracing diversity, and creating containers for true collaboration, where finance, medicine, and culture intersect for collective well-being.

Find Donna on 

Linkedin  https://www.linkedin.com/in/donna-morton-a2417214b/

Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/donna.morton.566

Salmon Returns website: https://www.salmonreturns.com/

Connect with Servane:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/servanemouazan/

Website: https://servanemouazan.co.uk

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Podcast Music Production from Series 04 Ep 45: Milig Mouazan-Strachan

Reweaving Wealth: The Salmon's Journey to Healing and Community, with Donna Morton

Servane Mouazan: Welcome to Be and Think in the House of Trust. My name is Servane from Conscious Innovation and in this series I welcome people who ignite social and environmental change through the way they invest, influence and move financial, social capital to make this world a bit less brutal. Together we think about trust, future kind collaborations and we notice the differences that make a difference. And today I'm excited to welcome a friend, Donna Morton and she's based in the west of Canada. She is a finance futurist, a poetic serial entrepreneur focused on funding and financing the future that centers life, culture and healing. She's an as shocker fellow. She's an unreasonable fellow, an oune fellow. Many, many, many things. I'm just going to take us on the journey of the salmon. A salmon that returns Settle in! Hi Donna.

Donna Morton: Hi Servane

Servane Mouazan: what a pleasure to meeting you again.

Donna Morton: It's beautiful returning. It's been many years.

Servane Mouazan: It is. I wonder before we explore what this salmon has to tell us, I wonder what stream or streams brought you to this estuary of doing what you're doing now.

Donna Morton: Donna, I love that question. in many ways this work, ah, at Salmon Returns is the culmination of a 40 year journey. but it weaves from two specific places. From a group called Salmon Nation that built a bio regionional vision for the region from Alaska to California, including British Columbia, and something I co founded a few years back called Edge Finance, which was an accelerator focused primarily on working with indigenous women of color to own the financial system. Like teaching people to walk their edges collectively and to use money as medicine, use the power of money as a transformational player in the world.

Servane Mouazan: He didn't always do finance. There is a lot of entrepreneurs, technology, a lot of culture. What more can you say about what fed this eagerness to use eventually money as medicine?

Donna Morton: Yeah, well, I spent a lot of my career in social justice, working on climate, working with indigenous communities around clean energy. I've been working sort of in that space between social justice and climate primarily for the last 40 years. But about 15 years ago I realized that everything I loved was being taken apart or extracted or worse destroyed by the House of Finance. And I decided House, the House of Finance was ground zero and that it felt so toxic that I wanted to learn how to make it something else. So I wanted to learn the craft and the tools so that I could be an artist and put it back together again with the right people in a way that actually feeds on the things that have to be taken apart or destroyed and produces beautiful things. And I've learned a lot about how finance can actually be kind of an instrument of healing instead of an agent of devastation.

Servane Mouazan: You can almost see yourself just, finding that vest, dismantling it, and de-weave it and re-weave it again, recrafting it with your spirit and your knowledge and your connection and your own threads.

Donna Morton: Well, interesting. This metaphor is very powerful because yesterday I had a conversation with a very powerful, indigenous woman from where I live, the Smu First Nation. Her name is Satassia White, and she's working with us at, Salmon Returns. And she was describing an ancient practice amongst her people using blankets. And they would use blankets in a potlatch ceremony to redistribute wealth in the community. But sometimes you would actually tear the blankets into strips

Donna Morton: and pass those out, and then people would tear the pieces of the pieces apart and reweave something new. And it feels like the perfect metaphor for what we're trying to do using money.

Servane Mouazan: It's like fibres. You shred them to fibres. Yeah, yeah.

Donna talks about thinking about her work as poetry or prayer

Shall we look at your poetry, Donna please? I think I've seen, you know, over the years, I've seen you come in, out with even more of these artistic stances and ways to express yourself, and they would be not doing you justice if we had'one of your, ways of expression. What if we talked about your work as poetry or as a prayer? What does it sound like?

Donna Morton: We basically built a prospectus. We built a very formal document that has many, appendices and strong, linear, rational arguments for the work. And that felt really important to do because we're trying to raise $100 million. And so you needed the solid case for why. But then something started happening inside me where I was like, yes, but. And there's this beautiful thing that's happening in the work that feels like prayer. The work feels like ceremony, like people cry at the meetings, people laugh at the meetings. I see these meetings for the work on my calendar, and I'm, like, lit up energetically. And I was like, I want to start talking about that in a way that's more poetic. And a series of poems happened. And so one of the first one was this idea of, what if we talked about our work as poetry or as prayer? What if the ones who return, like salmon, to their ancestral streams, guided by memory, older than maps, moving not just upstream, not just upstream, but upstream through time and across timelines. In this moment of unraveling, we remember that money, too, is a current and must be returned to right relationship, flowing with the land, not over it. Money has been flowing upstream and against life. Money has been hoarded and harming. What if money flowed back and down as medicine? What if we're the ones to listen, swim and flow? Money, like rivers, move. We protect what we love. We restore what was severed. We invest in what breeds. We heal and transform because we must. Our leadership is not domination. It is stewardship born of ceremony and listening, of bowing to the mystery, of walking behind the elders, of trusting the arc of history. We bend towards life and there's more. But that's the essence of what we're doing and how it feels. And sometimes in linear strategy, transformation, work, we can lose the poetry, we can lose that. Meetings can be incredibly beautiful places of deep democracy where we circle the way women have always circled and make decisions that can change everything.

Servane Mouazan: I wonder what would happen if we ask people around us to express what they want to accomplish through a poem or a piece of art or whatever ways of expressing themselves they do have. Because you just mentioned looking at your calendar and suddenly it energizes you. How beautiful is it not seeing life as a linear, segmented, siloed thing, but a three dimensional vibrancy? There's something in that poem that goes further down, actually. I'm very curious and I wonder if you allow me to continue the reading.

Servane explores what salmon culture teaches us about conflict in the workplace

so we, as you say, we, you. We hold nine sacred principles, like smooth stones in a medicine poachh. Dignity, justice, stewardship, democracy, intergenerational responsibility, community, wealth and well being, cultural flourishing, ecological economics and radical truth. And then there's that part when you say we move in nine ways of togetherness, coinition, collaboration, co creat, co design, co produce, co develop, co on, coexist, communicate, each co a braid in the basket of belonging. Now

there's. That triggered a question to me. There's another co word that doesn't bring people together but that force people to be together. And that's the co conflict striking with, against someone. And I wonder what does the return in Salon teach us about conflict? And in the workplace or in the community, what does he teach us? I'm so curious.

Donna Morton: I love that question. I think there's something, And you know, I'm from the east coast of Canada. I'm from Ana Shinaabe territory and mostly, you know, a European background and have had this incredible gift of living on the west coast now for over 30 years. And I've learned from so many, particularly co Salish and New Challh, Qu Quawa nations And one of the things that is really beautiful about salmon cultures, which know many, Scottish, English, French cultures, were also salmon people. but one of the things I've learned about the Turtle Island, west coast salmon people is this idea that salmon are away. Salmon isn't just food and culture and the rivers are sacred. Salmon is this idea, this athos of service and sacrifice. The salmon gives itself back to the river that made it. There is this deep, cellular knowledge inside the salmon that it has one home, it smells it and it knows how to get there and has its entire life force focused on serving that purpose. I think there's something about that knowledge and that idea of serving life itself that is coded into the salmon and into the people that know that salmon is sacred. And so I think there's something in my various bloodlines that are all salmon people bloodlines that actually is healing through my work with all of the other salmon people, now that I get to work with. And this idea that salmon are teachers, rivers are teachers, nature creates patterns for us. And all we have to do as, these overthinking monkeys is chill out, cal down, regulate our nervous systems and remember that we are of nature, part of nature. We dance with nature. We're not attracted to nature, we're not saving nature. We are nature. We are her expression. And so there's something about returning that salmon returning, that we can return and that the wealth that was extracted and taken can return back to its rightful place. All through learning from the sort of genius of the salmon.

Dona says she was poisoned by CO2 and had to regenerate

Servane Mouazan: And Donna, what do you feel you will notice when you are returning to, you know, that home yourself?

Donna Morton: I think, it's interesting returning and home has a different meaning for me because I was in an asthma attack related coma less than six months ago. And actually what happened to my body is I had a chemical reaction that caused the CO2 in my body to build up. So I was being poisoned to near death by CO2 like the Earth is. And then I came back and had to regenerate. And my body knew how to regenerate. My body regenerated fast. I got a lot of my ability to move and mental kind of acumen back in the first couple of months. And then it's been a succession of baby steps and leaps. And so I feel like what's happened is in my own return, I'm also learning about what it will be like for the earth to remember, regenerate and return and that she has those same aptitudes. So I don't have an intellectual relationship

Donna Morton: Anymore to we have to get on top of climate change and reduce you to. And then there will be this linear, you know, progression back to the way the systems were before. I know it, I know she will heal and return and I know it from inside my own body because I was also CO2 poisoned and survived it and have actually thrived on the other side of it. and so there's something about that return story in my own life. and so all we're trying to do with Salmon Returns is build the infrastructure for the 21st century. Food and energy and housing and ways of life that actually bring about well being for the people and every living thing because we are entirely capable of doing that. And we can use money as an instrument of regeneration. We can use money as an instrument of healing people, culture, ecosystems and life. We just have to decide and do it and stop playing games and stop using cute little terms like impact investing which hasn't worked or ESG which never was going to work. We have to actually align money with life and lots of indigenous communities still know how to do that. and so that's what we're listening first.

We've forgotten to listen to our bodies in modernity

Servane Mouazan: I love your focus. Because the image I see popping up here when you describe the infrastructure that is necessary to create the conditions for a returning is actually bed and table, sleep and food and what more important than that as an infrastructure for well being, for thinking, for co living, for returning?

Donna Morton: Yeah. And I love that you're down to that simple level because I actually think we've forgotten in modernity to listen to our bodies, to follow the body, to be our animal selves in nature, put someone completely disturbed into nature and their entire vagus nervous system, their emotional responses to the world comes down, they start breathing more deeply. They literally start being breathed by nature. And that is the work to. We can't just be up in our heads and thinking, thinking, thinking that we're going to solve problems in, in the same mechanism that broke the planet. We have to actually be nature serving nature alive, joyfully laughing our butts off while we do it.

Servane Mouazan: Yeah, you can think with your body. That's the whole thing. That's nothing else happens than that actually. And we're not reductionist and we try to be reductionist, but it doesn't work, does it? It doesn't work. So more attunement Donna. That's what I'm hearing. More attunement. there's harmony harmonizing, in the returning. if you knew that more and more people were able to attune, to harmonize, to stay, to be. What would change for the summon?

Donna Morton: Everything. I mean, sometimes I have this thought because I, you know, I live on this beautiful island that has whales that swim past almost every day right now. And people post on Facebook, you know, that they saw whales here or they saw whales there. And, sometimes I almost picture the whales a in a congress saying, oh, yeah, there's more humans that are starting to wake up, like, it’s gonna be okay. I saw humans on the beach today and they looked happy and they look connected to each other. And so I think they're starting to remember who they are. And I feel like that. I feel like there's this invitation from nature to. For us as these humans to come home. Just like I think we have to be constantly welcoming more and more people back into the collective and into the biggest we in human history. And right now there's so much divide, so much division,

Donna Morton: so much hate and othering. And frankly, I've lived my life in the progressive woke, sort of left side of the world. And right now I also feel like it's entirely essential for me to be loving to people that were lied to and duped and manipulated and whose regulations and nervous system and traumas were exploited to make them hate. We have to open the tent of humanity and invite all of those people back home, just like we have to invite the billionaires back home to their humanity because their money has separated them. They were taught in families, particularly dynasty families. No one likes you. No one wants you. They only want your money. And that is the worldview that many of these wealthy people have grown up inside. And so if we want them and their hearts, we have to invite their wholeness. That only happens by us bringing our own wholeness to the work. And so it all comes back to who am I? What do I love? And how wide is that love? How inviting is that we? Because the biggest we in human history happens if we make it happen. M.

Servane Mouazan: Now, what people can't see is that you are speaking with your heart, with your memory, with your ancestors, with the big we. You also speak with your hands. And there is a dance happening in front of me. So my last question is, what more do you and your arms and your body think or feel or want to say?

Donna Morton: I did a lot of healing, movement, rehabilitation when I came out of the coma with actually a woman from France named Flo de Dam who lives where I live. And, she taught me a lot about my body as an Instrument of healing myself and that I could trust it again, even though, you know, I slipped into a coma and was a little mad at myself. Like, what the hel body, like what happened? and. And you know, she really taught me a lot about following my body back into wellness and to not get upset if my balance was off or if I couldn't do a yoga pose that I used to be good at. and there's something about this idea of following the body and as I did it was fascinating. I couldn't walk on my own for a while. I had to humble myself and use a walker and then use a cane, and it was harder my ego. and I learned that movement begets movement and balance begets balance. And you just have to do it and you just have to show up and you have to train. I had to heal like an athlete trains. But as my balance came back and I could walk on my own, I could read again. M so my brain knew to hold back and be a little bit conservative and thoughtful with how I healed. And it followed my body. And that was an incredible teaching. And so now in the work we're doing, I check in often and I listen. Is this person a good fit for this work? Do they feel like they re fit? Are they going to touch this work like it's a prayer? Are they gonna bring their whole selves to the work? Are we going to create a container where real diversity? And if you look at our list of who's playing with us right now, it's a very diverse group, diverse thought, diverse racial backgrounds, gender diversity. it is the we that I think the world needs and we are beautiful with each other. Finance people, medicine people, people with shamanic backgrounds, people that have done policy work, people that have, built the most sophisticated fintech platforms for some of the biggest banks in the world. We are all playing together beautifully because we're letting ourselves be calm and sweet. and we're listening to these bigger signals, each other and our own kind of sweet bodies.

Servane Mouazan: O well, Donna, thank you so much for this journey from the source to, you know, the sea and going through the bed and the rivers and, you know, the journey that one has to go through to learn to walk and swim and feed again. this togetherness, came up so strongly today. So I just want to know on our, where can people find you?

Donna Morton: LinkedIn on Facebook, and our website, which is salmonreturns.com

Servane Mouazan: Fantastic. We’ll put this in the notes for everybody. Thank you, Donna. It was a pleasure talking with you again, listening to you and your togetherness. Well, that's it for us this week. Come back soon to the House of Trust. Share this Episode Comment subscribe to the show anywhere you can find your podcasts. For more insights and opportunities to think independently for yourself and as yourself and with your team, you can head to my website servanemouazan.co.uk and sign up for my regular Conscious Innovation updates. People who love to invest in change and ignite hopeful actions. keep connecting Goodbye.