Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance

Do you know where your money is? More importantly, do you know what your money is doing? 

In this talk, Mark Davis (University of Leeds) will guide you through the key arguments in this new book – a unique collaboration between an academic and a practitioner, which tells the story of money from ancient Athens to the Bitcoin revolution.

Following the ‘big numbers’ of COP26, Mark reports on  how crowdfunding is providing people with an opportunity to reclaim the transformative power of their money in pursuit of a fairer and greener society.

Dr Mark Davis is an economic sociologist at the University of Leeds. Working with Abundance Investment and Local Partnerships, Mark’s research assessed the suitability of investment-based crowdfunding for the public sector, leading to the co-creation with UK local authorities of the new Community Municipal Investment (CMI) product to finance green and social infrastructure projects in local economies. To date, the model has been launched in West Berkshire, Warrington and Islington, raising £2.5M for local net zero projects. CMIs are now part of a national campaign led by the Green Finance Institute. Active in a number of policy and civil society spaces, Mark’s new book Crowdfunding and the Democratization of Finance (co-authored with Abundance’s Bruce Davis) is out now, published by Bristol University Press.