Since our first conversation in a Mexican restaurant in Connecticut,  we – Karen Hust and Todd Vogel – have talked about the importance of making our resources serve our values.

So, why fund where the environment and equity meet? The answer, for both Karen and Todd, goes way back.

Young Karen found solace in the arms of an Illinois Maple tree when her parents’ marriage was ending. Later, the Oaks of Northern California nourished her.   And Karen has never stopped expanding her understanding about what nature has to teach her or stopped thinking about her responsibility to the Earth. Her academic scholarship and her artwork today focus there.

Young Todd bonded with nature in the woods of Southern Ohio, but the pivotal moment for him came  on the job. As a teenager, he washed dishes, dug and harvested in farm fields and, for his first two years of college, made bathroom medicine cabinets in a factory.  (He didn’t actually make the cabinets. He just put one rivet in a piece of sheet metal and pushed it down the line.) His coworkers taught him about manual labor and the class-based challenges in making a living with your hands. Because their factory floor was one of the most racially integrated places in Cincinnati, Ohio, they also taught him some of the ways that race operates in America.

For us, these two seemingly different worlds unite when we come together to ask this question: How do we help to weave a place that is healthy for everyone – one in which we care for the web of relationships that sustains all of us, both socially and physically?

That question carries our values.  And Loom is our effort to direct, with creativity and innovation, our resources there.