XioPartners

Amazing to hear Dr. Iliana Perez, Executive Director of Immigrants Rising during her panel earlier in the day. Dr. Perez and team have been leading the charge supporting entrepreneurs across California gain access to capital. The Immigrants Rising team just completed a study of mixed status entrepreneurs in Fresno, finding only 7% able to access capital through banks and only 1% were able to access through CDFIs. He team was able to distribute more than $5 million in grants to over 1,000 entrepreneurs and businesses as part of the SEED program.

So excited to be at California Forward’s 2025 Economic Summit in Stockton, California.

Today’s first Plenary Session “From Abundance to Shared Prosperity” focused on the need for California to reimagine models for growth—while maintaining the state’s focus on our climate and inclusive economy goals. Lindsay Maple, from UC Berkeley Possibility Lab who moderated the session, started the conversation by establishing a baseline definition around abundance pulling from the award winning book “Abundance” written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The book is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon chosen sacrifices that have deformed American life.

Panelists included:
-Alvaro S. Sanchez, Samuel Appel, Libby Schafer, and Victor Flores all leaders genuinely interested in creating more economic prosperity across California for millions of families.

Two main takeaways from this session were:
1) To overcome the dark side of entrenched economic & political interests/power more systems that invite a broad range of stakeholders in public and private sectors to meet and engage in good faith conversations around necessary investments must be created.
2) Policies must be revisited on an ongoing basis. When legislators passed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in 1970, it was considered a modest regulation, meant to ensure that government agencies considered how public projects could impact the state’s residents, wildlife and natural resources. Since then, the law’s scope has massively expanded. CEQA provided an easy path to legally challenge almost any project — public or private, large or small — on environmental grounds. It’s a favored tool among special interest groups — from NIMBY neighbors looking to stop growth to labor unions trying to negotiate agreements. A decade-spanning political battle between housing developers and defenders of California’s preeminent environmental law likely came to an end this summer with the passage of a state budget-related housing bill, AB 130.