our purpose

FreeCap Financial was founded in 2019 by Tanay Tatum-Edwards. Growing up in a small town in rural Florida, she saw some of the smartest people in her community go to prison instead of college and set out to understand how and why so many people she knew were pipelined into the prison system. She soon realized the influential role corporations played in the prison system, profiting off the exploitation of people every day.

FreeCap Financial is founded on the belief that if people truly understood that they could direct their investments to companies that provide opportunity, rather than feed injustice, they would. FreeCap is a research company that provides investors and money managers with intelligent, racial justice-oriented data that helps them leverage capital markets to dismantle the prison industrial complex—a necessary step to end mass incarceration. We capture information from a wide variety of public sources and translate it into investible insights for financial advisors, wealth managers, asset managers, and institutional investors so they can more easily align their portfolios with their clients’ values.

There are 2.2 million people incarcerated in the US, representing over 20% of the global incarcerated population. Black and Brown communities, immigrants, and those who suffer from mental illness are disproportionately impacted by this crisis of mass incarceration. The prison industrial complex exacerbates the problem. Companies routinely lobby to keep prisons full and pay below-market rates to access prison labor. To make matters worse, the discrimination formerly incarcerated workers experience in the workplace lead to unfairly high unemployment rates and increase the likelihood of recidivism. At FreeCap, we monitor and rate companies’ supply chain and hiring policies to highlight industry leaders and expose those who exacerbate the problem, enabling investors to make justice-informed investment decisions.