Meghan Chapple, Founder and Principal, Odwaga

Recordings:

Natixis: Findings from the 2023 Natixis DC Participant Survey

The Vogel Group: Updates on Anti-ESG Push: Regional and National

TIAA-Nuveen: Sustainable Retirement Options and ESG Backlash

Wespath: On Signing the Sustainable Retirement Plans Pledge

We invite you to register for next Tuesday’s webinar on the climate investing opportunities associated with the Inflation Reduction Act! On April 25 at 11 am ET, Brendan Bell, Radhika Shroff, and Sydney Bopp will talk through the IRA and learn how they are maximizing this new policy tailwind with highlighted case studies.

We’re also happy to announce the finalists for the 2023 Student Corporate Engagement Challenge!

Presidio Graduate School, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and Columbia University are the finalists in the graduate category, and the teams from LeHigh University, Central Washington University, and Virginia Wesleyan University are finalists in the undergraduate category. Learn more about their proposed investments and engagement strategies on the Challenge website!

Finally, students that are residents of MA or attending school in MA qualify for IEN’s Summer 2023 Sustainable Investing Internship. Interested qualifying students should email their cover letter and resume to [email protected] by April 28th.

In this week’s news, Victoria University and the University of the Pacific divest from fossil fuels, 31 faith organizations divest from fossil fuels, and the University of Pittsburgh publishes its second annual endowment ESG report.

We’re highlighting student opportunities and DEI in our work this week! Look out for the winners of our 2023 Students Corporate Engagement Challenge, to be announced the week of April 24th! In addition, we’re excited to partner and support the ESG for Impact Conference Scholarship, an all expense paid opportunity for students and recent graduates to attend the ESG for Impact Conference in October of 2023.

And we’re excited to share that our Director of JEDI, Paris Prince, was featured on this week’s DiverCity podcast! Listen to hear them, as well as our Senior Fellow Dorien Nunez, explore justice, DEI and ESG in the financial services industry.

Finally, we want to remind you that the investor letter in support of the FTC’s proposed rule to rescind and eliminate noncompetes in employment contracts closes next week, April 18. Directions to sign on are in our “Take Action” section and on our sign on page.

In this week’s news, FFI Solutions and IEN release a new episode of Beyond Carbon with Jenna Nicholas, a former treasury official defends the DOL’s 401(k) ESG rule, and CalPERS explains its opposition to a California divestment bill.

We are excited to announce that we have launched registration for our 2024 Higher Education Climate Leadership Summit! Take advantage of our lowest rates by registering today to join your peers in the sustainable investing space!

IEN Members can now watch the recording of last week’s webinar on “The Case for Diverse and Woman Owned Alternative GP Staking and Seeding.” We invite you to register for IEN’s upcoming learning opportunities this month and next!

First, join Align Climate Capital on April 25 at 11 am ET to learn about the impact the Inflation Reduction Act will have on climate investing. Next, Able Noser will join IEN on May 3 at 2 pm ET to illustrate how ESG consensus scores can optimize shareholder engagement.

In this week’s news, the University of Portsmouth divests from fossil fuels, the president of Impax Asset Management defends sustainable investing, and the higher ed sector examines how the anti-ESG push will affect college endowments.

The proxy season is underway. We've revamped our sign-on opportunities page with the latest proxy resolutions, voting guides and letters in support of ESG related initiatives to help you vote your proxy ballots and champion sustainable investing.

In this week’s news, Terra Alpha releases its 2022 Impact Report, the CEO of Impax says asset managers are running out of investable green assets, and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change launched its Net Zero Engagement Initiative

We’ll be closing Women's History Month next week with an all-female-panel webinar. Register to learn why GP seeding in diverse alternative asset managers remains insufficient, and how support of these managers aligns with institutional values on March 30, at 1pm ET. Register here.

In this week’s news, the University of Manchester publishes its endowment investments climate report, the UK Universities Climate Network releases its climate report, and Ceres’ CEO Mindy Lubber speaks out against the ESG backlash.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to register to join our final initiative call of this quarter. Participants of the Net Zero initiative call will discuss how to avoid greenwashing in Net Zero commitments including practical steps on Net Zero policy implementation.

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we'll be hosting a webinar on The Case for Diverse and Woman Owned Alternative GP Staking and Seeding on March 30 at 1 pm ET. Register to learn the process for identifying women owned GP firms and how to support them.

We also invite IEN- members to sign up for our next JEDI focused initiative call on March 21 for a discussion around quantifying impact and preparing for DEI disclosure requirements. In addition, the fourth episode of Beyond Carbon podcast featuring major league baseball player Brent Suter is now available for streaming.

In this week’s news, FFI Solutions releases an updated version of its Net Zero Blueprint for Institutional Investors, Biden gives the OK for the controversial Willow Oil Drilling Project, and Larry Fink releases his annual letter.

We’re excited to announce that Felicia Davis has been recognized as IEN’s first Leadership Award recipient for her excellence in championing our network’s efforts to engage more HBCUs in climate justice conversations. We also invite IEN members to register for next week’s Investment Governance Initiative conversation.

In this week’s news, Vanguard faces pressure from investors, RBC moves to tie incentive compensation for CEOs to its climate strategy, and BlackRock and Rockefeller begin to set their priorities for proxy voting season.

May 16, 2023 | 2 PM ET

Our economy's prioritization of short-term returns over long-term value creation has exacerbated the issues of climate change, racial injustice, and widening economic inequality. Higher education institutions are making critical choices every day about how to operate in a society and economy facing multiple intersecting crises. 

Colleges and universities allocate $650 billion in capital toward endowment assets and $890 billion toward retirement funds. These institutions have the power to adopt investment strategies that create an equitable, low-carbon, and regenerative society and economy. However, over the past year, there has been a concerted effort by political forces attempting to discredit the use of environmental, social and governance (ESG) information in the investment process. The turmoil has been stoked via media campaigns and state laws that ban certain investment management firms that have been vocal about the (financial and societal) value of considering issues like climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion in the investment process.

Higher education institutions are influential actors with power to drive systemic change – to benefit themselves and society as a whole. In this webinar, we will discuss why political attacks against sustainable investing are relevant to higher education, share the current sustainable investing landscape, and invite you to take action to protect higher education’s ability to consider sustainability metrics when investing endowment and retirement funds.

Recording

Slides

September 9, 2022

This JEDI Quarterly call, led by JEDI co-chairs Dorien Nunez and Angela Outlaw-Matheny, featured presentations from leaders in the diversity and equity space in asset management. Speakers included:

• Bhakti Mirchandani, Managing Director, Responsible Investing at Trinity Church Wall Street and Co-Founder and Steering Committee Member of Institutional Allocators for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (IADEI)
• Stephanie Westen, Investment Operations Analyst, University of Rochester
• Jamie Lu, Manager, Investments, CommonSpirit Health
• Gil Garcia, Garcia Hamilton & Associates
• Lisa Renstrom & Kate Simpson, Co-Founders at ValuesAdvisor

Recording:

Meeting Notes

IEN's JEDI Initiative is comprised of senior leaders from higher education, the investment industry, foundations, and non-profit partners. The group seeks to leverage the wide networks and expertise of the members and enable cross-sectoral collaboration to ensure that this work is championed by a diverse range of decision-makers involved in the endowment investment process.

Learn more about the JEDI Initiative on its homepage, or contact IEN's Director of JEDI, Paris Prince, at [email protected]

June 22, 2023 | 1:30-3:00 pm EST

This initiative supports higher education institutions in learning about Net Zero Portfolios, making commitments, and participating in shareholder engagement efforts to get portfolio companies onto decarbonization pathways aligned with the 1.5 degree C warming target of the Paris Climate Agreement.  

IEN convenes and supports endowments in learning about Net Zero Portfolios, making commitments, and participating in shareholder engagement efforts to get portfolio companies onto decarbonization pathways aligned with the 1.5 degree C warming target of the Paris Climate Agreement.  

If you or your organization would like to learn more or participate in this initiative, please contact Georges Dyer at [email protected].

Recording:

Regina Cho, Investment Director, Crewcial Partners

April 25, 2023 | 11 AM ET

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) is one of the most significant climate policies ever adopted by the United States with the injection of more than $360 billions of incentives to scale climate solutions. What are investors doing to capitalize on the advancement associated with the IRA, and how are they implementing solutions? These three industry professionals talked through the IRA and explored how they are maximizing this new policy tailwind with highlighted case studies.

Speakers:

 Brendan Bell, Chief Operating Officer at Aligned Climate Capital

 Radhika Shroff, Managing Director, Private Equity Impact Investing at Nuveen

 Sydney Bopp, Partner at Boundary Stone Partners

Recording:

Radhika's slides

IEN introductory slides

March 30, 3023

The Endowment community continues showing interest in diverse, emerging, and women owned investment enterprises as it seeks competitive returns and avenues to further ESG and DEI mission objectives. GP staking and seeding in diverse alternative asset managers is a vastly under-resourced endeavor that can support these objectives.

There is a significant unmet need for diverse and women-owned alternative managers to source equity staking and seed capital for their enterprises that affords savvy and mission-oriented investors to achieve attractive long-term returns while meeting their mission objectives. This webinar will consider the opportunity set, risks, and rewards of such activity.

Participants of this webinar will learn the following:

● The process for identifying women owned GP firms and how to seed them

● The due diligence that goes behind that effort

● Learn the historical data supporting women owned GP financial performance.

Speakers:

Sherrese Clarke Soares, Founder and CEO, Harbourview Equity Partners

Jenifer B. Rizza, CFA, CAIA Trust Investment Manager, Eversource

Tina Byles-Williams, Xponance Founder, CEO & CIO

Lisa Hinds, Managing Director, Client Engagement & Sustainability (Moderator)

Recording:

Slides:

Eversource Slides

Xponance Slides

IEN Introduction Slides

June 13, 2023 | 1 pm ET

Preview the Agenda

IEN's JEDI Initiative seeks to start the education and advocacy process for endowments to consider JEDI factors in the investment process in the following ways:

• Enhancing diversity within the university investment offices by ensuring people are not excluded deliberately or through implicit bias on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender.
• Evaluating the performance of companies and funds with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their boards, management, and staff in the investment process and engage with companies and funds to improve on these issues.
• Identifying minority-led investment managers.
• Making investments that benefit women, low-income communities, and communities of color.
• Supporting finance and investment education of diverse students to build a pipeline of talent.

We advance the conversation on this agenda through a series of educational and peer-networking activities, including events, webinars, and white papers.

JEDI Initiative Call Recap

We held our JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) quarterly call featuring four industry leaders' presentations on various aspects of racial equity investing. See details below

Tynesia Boyea-Robinson, President and CEO at CapEQ, presented on the The Investor Blueprint, a tool kit that outlines the full scope of what it means to invest equitably and setting the norms for all investing to be equitable.

View Tynesia's Slides

__________________

Kendall Bedford, Impact Fellow at SustainVC, shared her personal experience and research on DEI within the impact focused private market investing.

View Kendall's Slides

__________________

George Suttles, Executive Director at the Commonfund Institute presented on the mission of the Commonfund Institute and his strategy for identifying diverse asset managers including implementation strategies.

View George's Slides

__________________

Monique Aiken, Managing Director at The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), shared on why and how to connect investors’ action to racial equity as an investment risk by reorienting the strategy level from a portfolio approach to a holistic approach.

May 3, 2023 at 2 pm ET

With over 30,000 global publicly traded companies to cover, overburdened staff, manual processes, and lack of benchmarking tools, how do organizations effectively monitor or target fund portfolio companies for shareholder engagement?

Our discussion will revolve around how to use quantitatively structured ESG consensus scores to accomplish this important function. Valid, consistent, and comprehensive ESG engagement ratings data is critical for a proper oversight process. The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the consumption of ESG adherence data has provided a solution to this problem: ESG consensus ratings.

By using ESG consensus ratings, asset owners can identify those companies within a fund’s portfolio or (target lists) whose key performance indicators are aligning with an organization’s ESG goals.

Participants will learn:

• To use quantitative research to evaluate public equity portfolio alignment with fund values and ESG policies;
• To develop data driven shareholder engagement strategies and dialogues with portfolio companies;
• To track ESG performance trends and benchmarking corporate dialogues with new reporting tools and analytics;
• To obtain breakouts of each ESG metric to better understand weaknesses and strengths;
• To efficiently scale shareholder advocacy campaigns;
• To apply what they've gathered to real world use cases

Recording

Dale's Slides

Brian's Slides

MIT Study referenced by Brian

ESG Returns article referenced by Brian

Speakers 

Eric Darrisaw, Senior Consultant, Hackett Group

View Eric's bio 

Brian J. Greene, Senior Vice President, Zeno AN Solutions

View Brian's Bio

Dale M. Neibert, Managing Director, OWL ESG, Inc.

View Dale's bio

Today, we see an increase in companies increasing their mission-driven and communication along ESG principles, to attract a values based workforce, investor base, and like-minded consumer. Impact investing strategies are proving to be able to generate returns in line to their traditional counterparts. Over the next three decades, it is estimated that over $68+ trillion will transfer from baby boomers to Millennials. As we move to the next generation of investors, we are finding more companies aligning their beliefs, operation, and communication strategies with that of the Millennials & Gen X.

The ESG & Impact Investing Forum will look at many of the asset classes that encompass this space. We invite you to join us and meet top influencers, experienced investors, money managers, and service providers that are leading the charge in this ever growing space. Themes of defining impact investing, portfolio construction, asset class opportunities, comparing ESG vs Impact trends and the role of the investor are just a few of the stimulating topics to be covered at this event.

On our regular SIILK Network calls, a different faculty member or student presents on their work as it relates to a student-managed fund or sustainable investing focused course.

Below are recordings of each presentation. If you are interested in presenting on your work on an upcoming call please reach out to Nicole at [email protected]

• Yale University: Dwight Hall SRI Fund | October 2017 
• Middlebury College: RISE (Research and Investment in Sustainable Equity) l April 2018
• Bryant University: Archway Investment Fund l May 2018
• Stanford University: Graduate School of Business Impact Fund l September 2018
• Loomis Chaffee School: ESG Fund l October 2018
• How SASB Metrics Can Be Used in Fund Analysis l November 2018
• University Impact l March 2019
• Northeastern University: NU Impact l April 2019
• University of Minnesota: Carlson Funds Enterprise l April 2019
• New York University: Impact Investing Fund l September 2019
• Emory University: Goizueta Impact Investors l October 2019
• Arizona State University: Socially Responsible Investment Fund l December 2019
• Portland State University: Impact Venture Fund l January 2020
• Bentley University: Bentley Sustainable Investment Group l February 2020
• Northeastern University: NU Impact l May 2020
• University of Utah: Impact Venture Fund l October 2021 
• Student-Led Shareholder Engagement Network (SIILK Quarterly Call) | February 2023

March 15, 2023

We invite IEN Members to join our first Investment Governance call of 2023 on Wednesday, March 15 at 2 pm ET!

IEN’s Investment Governance Initiative supports endowment fiduciaries in developing the tools needed to provide the leadership, stewardship, and governance to ensure their portfolios and institutions are positioned to have their investment practices reflect their mission while meeting the endowment’s risk and return objectives.

Members of the Investment Governance Initiative undertake and enable peer-to-peer connections among endowment trustees and actively serve as ambassadors for IEN.

Speakers and topics:

• Fiduciary Duty with Tiffany Reeves, Partner, Faegre Drinker
• UPMIFA and Building Diverse Investment Committees with George Suttles, Executive Director, Commonfund Institute
• Driving Financial Performance with Impact Measurement Frameworks with Kate Murray, Director - Impact Strategy & Measurement, TAS Impact

Recording: