Spear’s Review

Stephanie Brobbey was a successful private wealth lawyer at Goodman Derrick who rose through the ranks after joining the firm in 2009. There was talk of her ascending to partnership, but in 2018 she learned there were more food banks in the UK than McDonald’s restaurants. 

The realisation led to a fork in her career path, and Brobbey switched from her role as a lawyer helping UHNWs protect their assets to helping them use their wealth for social good. She set up the Good Ancestor Movement in 2021 to help clients understand how they can best mobilise their riches to support causes they are close to, such as grassroots movements, affordable housing and climate-resilient projects. 

Brobbey explains that her consultancy works on a flat-fee basis to examine investment portfolios and educate clients about creating a fairer economic system. The Good Ancestor Movement offers an alternative to most of the private wealth industry, which she says is designed to ‘accumulate wealth, however excessive’. 

An outspoken supporter of a wealth tax in the UK, she says ‘[there] is certainly the spirit of activism, because it’s fundamentally about pursuing justice’. 

‘Our economic system, as it stands today, is not capable of being sustained in its current capacity. It will collapse at some point,’ Brobbey told a crowd of private wealth advisers at a Spear’s 500 Live panel event in 2023. ‘And there is an opportunity to participate in being part of that transition to an economic system that works for everyone.’

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Following a successful career as a private wealth lawyer, the Good Ancestor Movement’s founder and chief executive officer Stephanie Brobbey started to envision an alternative wealth advisory practice for clients seeking to integrate their values into their wealth stewardship in a holistic sense.

After more than a decade in private practice, Brobbey launched the Good Ancestor Movement, a not-for-profit social purpose organisation which exists to disrupt traditional approaches to wealth stewardship by challenging traditional ideas about the economy, wealth accumulation, tax and redistribution.

Brobbey’s practice is focused on supporting wealthy individuals and families to align their wealth with their values. Brobbey supports wealth creators and inheritors primarily based in the UK, Europe and North America to transform their practices around wealth, tax and redistribution. A highly skilled trusted adviser with a person-centred approach, Brobbey works with clients who seek to use their wealth in service of an economy that serves people and the planet. As such, she supports clients with strategies that transform wealth accumulation into redistribution towards community-led initiatives that are developing solutions to issues such as: ecological breakdown, climate change and inequality. Brobbey’s clients are allocating capital to neighbourhood transformation, regenerative food systems, agroecology, climate resilience, community infrastructure building and so on.

Now one of the most influential practitioners in the field, Brobbey is an internationally renowned trusted adviser and a sought-after keynote speaker. Widely recognised in mainstream press, she regularly appears as a spokesperson and commentator on broadcast media. In recognition of her work, she was elected as an Ashoka Fellow in 2022 and as a fellow of the Just Economy Institute’s 2023-2024 cohort.