The 2017 season for corporate annual reports and general meetings is in full swing. And the overarching question for companies is how to reconcile dueling visions of corporate purpose: sustainable long-termism versus short-term shareholder value maximization. Unilever CEO Paul Polman recently gave some insight into his company’s investment roadmap in an interview with CNBC. “In the […]
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What You Need to Know About New ESG Fund Ratings
By Janet Brown What makes a fund sustainable? Many people think that sustainable means environmentally friendly, but sustainable investing actually covers three broad categories: environmental, social and governance (ESG). Environmental issues are typically the most widely understood, but social and governance policies are just as important. A socially responsible company seeks to treat its workers […]
Is Trump the Tipping Point for Ethical Investing?
By Joshua Levin You may have voted against U.S. President Donald Trump, protested his policies, and ranted to your friends. Yet most of us are financing him and his agenda. With any typical investment account, 401(k) or pension, Americans indirectly fund their opposition parties and directly finance polarizing activities such as weapons production, private prisons, and […]
Investors Put Over $8B Into Conservation: Can It Continue in the Trump Era?
By Kelley Hamrick On a mild, rainy day in Washington, D.C., America inaugurated its 45th president. The incoming administration represents a fundamental shift from the outgoing Obama administration. And the White House website was updated accordingly. Instead of a clean-energy future, WhiteHouse.gov now announces: “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the […]
Will Equity Crowdfunding Accelerate Impact Investing in 2017?
By Jamie Garuti This past May, a new world of possibilities opened up for social entrepreneurs around the country. The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) approved Title III, the final part of the 2012 JOBS Act. The new regulation allows for equity crowdfunding, a mechanism that ordinary people can use to become stakeholders of startups. […]
How to Move Sustainable Investing Into the Spotlight
I am new to the world of sustainable investments. For the last 25 years, before joining the Climate Trust, my career was centered almost exclusively on timberland investing. The corollaries between sustainable and timberland investing may not be apparent at first, but U.S. timberland investing is based almost entirely on sustainable forestry. In fact, most […]
The Quiet Progress of Green Property Funds
At the nexus between property developers and today’s socially-conscious investors stands an increasingly persuasive investment choice. Called a green property fund or impact fund, it’s an influential way for investment managers in emerging markets to match developers with those who aspire to both profits and positive change. The concept is simple: Fundraise from third-party clients […]
Why is Nobody Talking About Financial Advisors?
By Tyler Jackson If we want environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors to permeate all layers of the financial system, we need to talk about financial advisors. As Jessica Matthews, head of mission-related investing at Cambridge Associates, said at SOCAP16, “We need to think of advisors as a gateway, rather than a gatekeeper to impact […]
Stranded Assets: Preventing the Next Era of Climate Change
By Joyce Coffee I first heard the term “stranded assets” at a Bloomberg event in New York City during Climate Week 2014. For me, the term conjured up images of homeowners and their dogs waiting atop roofs to be rescued during Hurricane Katrina. Yet that didn’t seem right for the context of the discussion, and […]
Turning Ethical Investing into a Wall Street Disruptor
OpenInvest, a new investing platform that beta-launched at SOCAP16, aims to transform investing by putting the power of ethical investing into each investor’s hand. Sustainable investing is no buzzword – it has been over a decade since the first sustainability-focused investment firms and options emerged. Even as evidence as grown that sustainable investing is actually […]
Missing the Target with Conservation Finance
By Sean Penrith “Are we doing enough?” This was the question Patrick Westerlund of the Wells Foundation asked a packed room in a session titled “Missing the Target” at the 2016 Mission Investors Exchange (MIE) conference in Baltimore. He added that with just the money represented in the room, we could change the world. Based […]
Invest Cheese and Eat it Too at Maker’s Common
By Julie Fahnestock 310. $310,000, that is. That’s the amount of money Californians have invested into a Direct Public Offering (DPO) for the soon-to-be eatery/market, Maker’s Common. For the last five years, cheese lovers and founders of Mission Cheese and Maker’s Common, Sarah Dvorak, Oliver Dameron and Eric Miller, have positioned their first business — […]
I’m Over Doing Good
By Patsy Doerr As global head of corporate responsibility and inclusion for Thomson Reuters, I can proudly say, “I’m over doing good.” These critical issues: diversity and inclusion, sustainability, gender, corporate social responsibility and philanthropy, which were once delegated as HR issues or a ‘nice to have’ are no longer optional. Pushing the corporate responsibility […]
Sustainability Ratings: Coming to an Investment Near You
By Ben Gruitt Last month Morningstar Inc., an investment research and management firm, announced a new sustainability rating system would be available for funds on its North American and European websites as well as in Morningstar Advisor Workstation, the company’s Web-based practice management platform for advisors. The Morningstar Sustainability Rating aids investors in evaluating funds based […]
Will Bad Companies Fail? Want To Bet?
Peabody Energy declared bankruptcy last week. Some were surprised; others not so much. One such investor is Dale Wannen, founder of socially-responsible hedge fund Sustainvest Asset Management, who has been shorting Peabody stock for months. Activists cheered when Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, declared bankruptcy last week. These activists have been lobbying endowments […]
Why Policy Change is the Only Way to Open Impact Investing Floodgates
Bain Capital and Blackrock have created dedicated impact practices. High net-worth individuals and family offices are gathering to share deals, ideas and experiences. Foundations are sharing best practices. And yet, the amount of dollars invested in real projects and actual businesses is still a minuscule percentage of all invested capital. What’s holding us back?
Women Rule: Why the Future of Social, Sustainable and Impact Investing is in Female Hands
By Marta Maretich In the early days of the social investing movement, women and girls were arguably seen more as program beneficiaries than financial movers and shakers. Social lenders changed their view when they realized that focusing initiatives like microfinance lending on women turned out to be the most effective way to make whole communities […]
Culture vs. the Ethical Bank
By Vince Siciliano UBS. JPMorgan Chase. Wells Fargo. Barclays. And now, HSBC. Since the U.S. mortgage meltdown, “big banks,” titans of global business, have continually been caught in ethical failings. Tax avoidance, interest rate manipulation, commodity and currency speculation, and money laundering, among other charges, have all surfaced — calling into question banks’ ability to […]
Etsy and the B Corp IPO: Sustainability Meets Wall Street
By Peri Schweiger and Jackie Marcus Corporate responsibility professionals have had a not-so-secret crush on investors for years. However, the investment community has been playing hard-to-get. There have been glimmers of interest – socially responsible investment funds, a few bold shareholder resolutions – but little signal from the broader community that a real relationship was […]
Is the Public Etsy Still Part of the Sharing Economy?
Etsy’s IPO took Wall Street by storm last week. The conversation was peppered with questions about whether or not a company that claims to be “a mindful, transparent and humane business” could succeed on Wall Street, a space where these adjectives are rarely used. Yet, this is not the question I’ll ask today. Instead, I’ll focus on is whether […]
What’s Behind the Boom in Women Entrepreneurs?
Woman-owned nonprofit Untapped Shores provides an opportunity for travelers to make a difference by carrying and delivering a life-saving business-in-a-box to a woman or a family in need. There are now 8.3 million women-owned businesses in the United States. Together they employ more people than McDonald’s, IBM and Wal-Mart combined, and their revenue of $1.3 […]
Why Gender Matters to Investors
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 2015 issue of Green Money Journal on “Women and Investing.” Read more excerpts here. By Joseph F. Keefe and Sallie L. Krawcheck The business case for gender diversity is now well documented. The research is compelling: When women are at the table – and better yet, in […]
Embracing a New Definition for Social Investing
By Marta Maretich Definitions — we are so over them in the social investing sector. I mean, we wrangled over those darn meanings for years: ethical investing, responsible investing, socially responsible investing, triple- and double-bottom-line investing, green investing, sustainable investing and finally — boom! — impact investing. We split hairs, we waved banners, we made […]