The first IEN Initiative call of Q2 will take place on June 8 at 12 pm ET. Join our Sustainable Retirements Initiative, along with presenters from Natixis, Wespath Benefits and Investments, TIAA-Nuveen, and the Vogel Group, for critical conversations on the ESG backlash and sustainable options in defined contribution plans.

We are also excited to announce the date of IEN’s 2023 Fall Forum, October 25, 2023 at Virginia Wesleyan University. Sponsorships are available; please contact Harrison Ungar at [email protected] if your firm is interested in supporting this convening.

In this week’s news, California’s fossil fuel divestment bill passes the state Senate, the Ford Foundation continues to push for greater inclusion in the asset management industry, and State Farm ceases to offer homeowner’s insurance in California for new customers.

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting our 2023 Fall Forum at Virginia Wesleyan University, October 25 2023. This year's Forums will be highly interactive with programming focused on peer to peer learning among endowments to advance the field of sustainable investing. Please stay tuned for registration and sponsorship details.

Additionally, as a proud partner of GreenFin 23, we invite you to register at a discounted rate to join over 900 investment professionals in Boston for three days (June 26 - 28) of impactful content sharing and network opportunities. Learn more about GreenFin23

In this week’s news, the University of Minnesota begins to develop an ESG policy for its foundation, the Collective Impact Coalition plans to engage with 10 oil and gas companies, and a group of UK asset owners press their managers on fossil fuel expansion.

As we ramp up preparations for our next slate of initiative calls, we invite IEN members to register for conversations on sustainable retirement plans, net zero endowments, JEDI, and investment governance.

In this week’s news, FFI Solutions partners with Geofinancial Analytics to track methane emissions, ISSB seeks feedback on its sustainability standards’ global applicability, and Concordia University is awarded $123 million for research on community decarbonization.

We’re eager to be in conversation with Second Nature and Ceres on anti-ESG legislation and its impact on universities. Register and join us next week Tuesday (5/16) at 2 pm ET to learn why political attacks against sustainable investing are relevant to higher education.

IEN Members can now view the recording of last week’s shareholder engagement webinar with Abel Noser and OWL ESG.

In this week’s news, Pirc recommends voting Shell’s chair out, the Supreme Court agrees to hear a case that could threaten the SEC’s climate rule, and Queen University’s first responsible investing report shows progress.

We’re thrilled to announce Presidio Graduate School and Central Washington University as the winners of our 2023 Student Corporate Engagement Challenge in the graduate and undergraduate category respectively! We invite you to watch the highlights from their presentations.

Additionally, oin us with Second Nature and Ceres on May 16 at 2 pm for a webinar on political attacks against sustainable investing in higher education and how endowments can take action to protect their ability to consider sustainability metrics when investing their capital.

In this week’s news, Hampshire College reaches operational net zero, Suzanne Biegel launches Heading for Change, and CalSTRS reveals its shareholder engagement priorities for the 2023 proxy voting season.

As proxy voting season draws to a close, we are looking forward to our shareholder engagement webinar next Wednesday at 2 pm ET. Register today to learn from OWL ESG and Abel Noser how to develop data driven shareholder engagement strategies and dialogues with portfolio companies.

We’d also like to thank those who were able to register for our recent webinar on the Inflation Reduction Act. IEN Members can watch the recording, and others from past conversations, on IEN’s past webinars page.

In this week’s news, the University of Manitoba approves a responsible investment policy, NYC pension funds release their emissions reduction progress, and Japan’s GPIF invests in a fund with a gender lens focus.

June 28, 2023 | 12 PM ET

While the critical work of increasing diversity in asset management and on Boards of companies, endowments, and foundations must continue, we must go further to address harm to BIPOC communities. How can our institutions and investments help dismantle practices and structures in all institutions that perpetuate harm? How can we recognize intergenerational trauma, eliminate the racial wealth gap, and end modern-day systemic racism through reparative redress for uncompensated labor, knowledge, and property of descendants of African and Indigenous people? 

During this webinar, leaders from the Intentional Endowments Network and its partners explored these questions and share ideas on how the network might effectively raise the bar for endowments and foundations' racial equity efforts, both working within the constraints of the current system and where the system might need to change.

All donations and proceeds from this webinar were donated to Reparations Finance Lab, a financial services non-profit dedicated to facilitating private sector allocation of reparative capital to the descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade globally.

Recording:

Monique's Slides

Speakers:

 Moderator: Dorien Nunez, Co-Founder and President, OMNIResearch; Senior Fellow, Intentional Endowments Network

 Enith Williams, Founder and Executive Director, Reparations Finance Lab

 Obie Mckenzie, Trustee, Tennessee State University

 Dr. Thomas Craemer, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut

 Dianne Dillon Ridgley, Board Chair, Crane Institute of Sustainability, Intentional Endowments Network

 Monique Aiken, Managing Director, The Investment Integration Project

The Student Impact Fund Collaborative officially formed in spring 2021. Its development was spearheaded by Neha Delal, then, the co-chief investment officer of Stanford GSB’s Impact Fund, the largest of the student-managed impact venture funds (SMIVF). She fielded numerous emails from students at Harvard, Wharton, and other schools wanting to start their own impact venture funds.

The collaborative now consists of SMIVFs at 15 schools. In the U.S., there’s Stanford GSB, Berkeley Haas, Harvard Business School, Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, Columbia Business School, Dartmouth Tuck, Duke’s Fuqua, UCLA Anderson School of Management, Chicago Booth, University of Michigan, Wharton School, and Yale School of Management.

International schools include Indian Institute of Management Udaipur, Instituto de Estudios Superiores de la Empresa, and London Business School.

During the 2020-2021 academic year, at least 409 students worked in SMIVFs including 287 MBA students, 68 other graduate students, and 54 undergraduates.

From: Poets&Quants

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Sponsorships for this event are available; please review the sponsorship brochure or contact Aicha Ly at [email protected] to discuss sponsorship opportunities.  

Pedro Henriques da Silva

June 20, 2023 | 11 am to 12:30 pm ET

IEN's Investment Governance Initiative connects trustees to create opportunities for peer-to-peer learning among college and university fiduciaries on sustainable investing. It also develops documents and other vehicles to clarify for higher education trustees how sustainable investing strategies relate to their fiduciary duties, designed for audiences of trustees, presidents, CIO's, and CFO's.

This quarterly call is open to members only. To learn more about this initiative or IEN membership, contact Harrison Ungar at [email protected].

Note: This quarter's Inv Gov Initiative call was mainly conversational; since the presentations were only a small portion of the convening, we do not have a recording available to share.

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.