Advancing Racial Equity as Institutional Investors: A Juneteenth Conversation with the Belonging Collaborative
June 18, 2024 | 6 PM ET
Join us for a thought-provoking webinar, by the Belonging Collaborative, as we delve into the intersection of climate and racial justice. Investors are actively driving change by promoting diversity in asset management and pivotal decision-making positions, but the journey towards true climate and racial justice is far from over; it demands our immediate attention and concerted actions.
This crucial movement, pushing for equitable access to capital, diversity in asset management and decision-making roles within organizations, foundations, and endowments, not only sets the stage for social impact but also for financial success. However, we need to reflect on how our current practices may inadvertently perpetuate harm to BIPOC communities and explore how investment strategies can play a pivotal role in dismantling these destructive patterns and structures.
As we navigate the complexities of systemic racism, the racial wealth gap, and the disproportionate impacts of climate change on front-and fence-line communities, it becomes imperative to recognize, confront, and address these pressing issues head-on. How can we best identify and tackle these challenges?
During this Juneteenth season conversation, leaders from the Intentional Endowments Network and its esteemed partners will not only explore the above questions but also share ideas on how this network can effectively elevate the standards for endowments and foundations' racial equity efforts. Be part of this conversation that aims to drive tangible change within our current systems and advocates for the necessary transformations where the system falls short.
Recording:
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CEO, Resilience Capital Ventures |
Managing Director, Reparations Finance Lab |
Co-Founder and Director of Research, The OMNIResearch Group, IEN Senior Fellow |
Director, Shifting Trillions, Sierra Club Foundation |
JEDI Community Conversation | May 23 | 1 pm ET
May 23 | 1:00 pm ET
In today's ever-evolving environment, mastering the nuances of transparency and disclosure is essential to upholding integrity and creating a meaningful impact in endowment management. The IEN JEDI Community Conversation, held as the ongoing demand for transparency transforms the landscape of endowment management in higher education, provided participants with the opportunity to learn how integrating Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) standards can evolve sustainable investing progress through the Endowment Impact Benchmark.
Call participants learned how to:
- Elevate their institution's impact
- Get valuable insights on improving sustainable investing policies
- Chart a course toward sustainability leadership
Recording
IEN Community Roundtable: Empowering HBCUs and JEDI Champions
November 6, 2023 | 3 pm ET
The IEN Community Roundtable was a unique event dedicated to supporting Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).This call provided an opportunity to engage with HBCU stakeholders and Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) professionals as we explored mission-aligned investing strategies and other critical topics and emerging trends that will shape the future of HBCU investments.
Participants discovered the distinctive needs and hurdles faced by HBCUs in their sustainable investing journey, learned from peers and thought leaders, and explored how the Intentional Endowments Network can support along the way.
Registrants enjoyed an opportunity to connect and delve into critical topics related to endowment management to make positive social and environmental impact with investments.
Recording:
Transcript
HBCU Roundtable Notes
Speakers:
Julian Thompson, Senior Director of Strategy Development Institute for Capacity Building, UNCF
Charles Prince, Chief Transformation and Sustainability Officer, Chief of Staff, Dillard University
Angela Outlaw-Matheny, Director of Diverse Manager Equity at Crewcial Partners LLC
IEN Webinar: The Case for Diverse and Woman Owned Alternative GP Staking and Seeding
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:
JEDI Initiative Quarterly Call Q2
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.
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Kendall Bedford, Impact Fellow at SustainVC, shared her personal experience and research on DEI within the impact focused private market investing.
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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.
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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.
IEN Webinar: Creating Racial Equity Standards for Investing
This webinar is part of IEN’s Investing in Racial Equity Series
Date: Tue, July 13, 2021, 1:00 p.m. ET
Participants will collectively examine the three strategic investment goals that drive racial equity: Power, Risk and Justice, and understand current approaches to investing in and measuring progress towards these goals. Through an interactive conversation with Tynesia, investors will also have a chance to think through a set of metrics that they can start to apply within their portfolios.
Racial disparities in business and finance are stark: 40% of the US population are people of color, but they represent only 20% of businesses with employees. The average white-owned business has over $18,000 in equity at founding, but the average Black-owned business has only $500. And only 1% of total global AUM are managed by Black people.
Impact investing as an industry has begun to solve some of these issues, but many of the systemic problems of investing have been replicated by the impact investing field. While impact investing has made great strides around ESG considerations, racial equity and racial justice has not been a major focus of the industry until recently. And this lack of a racial equity lens leaves money on the table: if 15% of Black-owned businesses were able to hire one more employee, the American economy could grow by $55 billion.
This session will engage participants to think about the financial benefits of integrating racial equity considerations into their investment decisions and key equity factors that should be included in the overall approach.
Recording:
Resources Shared:
- Investing in Racial Equity: A Primer for University and College Endowments | IEN
- Diversity in Action: The Framework | Institutional Limited Partners Association
- Path to 15 | 55 : a path to grow at least 15% of black businesses, create 600,000+ new jobs and add $55 billion to the US economy
- Rockefeller Brothers Fund's DEI approach
- The 2021 CEO Blueprint for Racial Equity: what companies can do to advance racial equity and combat systemic racism in the workplace, communities, and society | PolicyLink, FSG and Just Capital
- Due Diligence 2.0 Commitment
- Impact America Fund & Jacmel Growth Partners : two organizations that are good examples of different approaches to investing for justice
View recordings of other webinars and workshops hosted as part of our Racial Equity Investing series here.
IEN Webinar - The Ins and Outs of Designing a Racial Equity Portfolio
Date: May 13, 2021, 1-2pm ET
How can investors be part of a solution to racial equality? Come join us for an introduction to Natixis AIA Racial Equity Portfolios, developed in partnership with JUST Capital and Anthony Rust, Consultant and IEN Board Member, aiming to avoid or divest from companies that cause, contribute to, exploit or profit from racial injustice.
Investors have a key role to play to bring about racial equity by steering capital towards companies that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). A growing body of evidence also points to how companies that are leaders in DEI outperform their peers. Natixis will speak to how they relied on the expertise of NGOs and advocacy organizations to align themselves to the realities of our changing society and identified opportunities that came with this broadened scope of analysis that’s overlooked by many investors.
Through this webinar, participants will come away with an understanding of:
- Why investing in companies that incorporate DEI and away from companies with business models that perpetuate racial inequities make financial sense
- What an approach that focuses on investing in companies that factor in the economic power of underrepresented populations looks like in practice
- How you can be a more socially conscious investor too
Speakers:
- Victor Howell, Vice President, Natixis Investment Managers
- Lorraine Spradley Wilson, Managing Director, Investment Products, JUST Capital
- Anthony Rust, Consultant / IEN Board Member
Recording:
Resources:
- Natixis Investment Managers Announces AIA Racial Equity Portfolios
- Customized Equity Portfolios Invest for Racial Equality
- A CEO Blueprint for Racial Equity
- Corporate Insights into the CEO Blueprint for Racial Equity
- The Corporate Racial Equity Tracker
IEN Webinar: Allocating to Diverse-Owned Asset Managers
Date: August 5, 2020
Historically, investors have prioritized diversification with a focus on asset class, investment strategy, sector, and company. However, the diversification of manager backgrounds (and thus perspectives) has often gone unexplored. Allocating to asset management firms owned by people of color is necessary to diversify talent and deal flow and improve the endowment investment's risk and return profile. This panel digs into examples of how institutions can begin to allocate to diverse-owned asset managers and leave the participants with action steps to deploy capital behind people of color for better investing.
Recording:
Resources:
- Diversifying Investments: A Study of Ownership Diversity and Performance in the Asset Management Industry, Knight Foundation, Bella Research Group & Harvard Business School, January 2019
- Racial Equity Investing: A Primer for College & University Endowments, Intentional Endowments Network, August 2020
- 2020 Belonging Pledge – A Commitment to Advance Racial Equity which is a sign-on pledge to discuss racial equity in your next investment committee meeting
- DAMI's website on tracking and reporting
- IEN's webpage on diverse managers which includes sample investment policy statements
Speakers:
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Tiffany McGhee, Partner, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Chief Investment Officer of Institutional Client Services, Momentum Advisors. Read Tiffany's bio here. |
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Jasmine Richards, Head of Diverse Manager Research, Cambridge Associates. Read Jasmine's bio here. |
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Anthony Rust, Chair of the Investment Committee, Warren Wilson College. Read Anthony's bio here. |
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Justin Wilson, Director, Diverse Asset Managers Initiative (DAMI). Read Justin's bio here. |
Webinar: Incorporating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Factors in the Investment Process
Date: November 14, 2018, 11:45 a.m. ET
This webinar will be a high level overview on how investors can incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) factors at various levels of the investment process. Panelists introduced the basics of DEI, why DEI consideration is important, and the various ways an institutional investor can consider DEI issues.
Presenters:
- Anthony Rust, Chair of the Investment Committee, Warren Wilson College; Impact Fund Manager, BEI Business Equity Fund
- Justin Wilson, Director, Diverse Asset Managers Initiative
- Julianne Zimmerman, Managing Director, Reinventure Capital
- Moderator: Kaede Kawauchi, Program Manager, Intentional Endowments Network
IEN Webinar: All Investments Affect Racial (In)justice
This webinar is part of IEN's Investing in Racial Equity Series
Date: December 15, 2020, 1:00 p.m. ET
It is abundantly clear how investments in private prisons, or lack of investments for entrepreneurs of color, affect racial justice outcomes. But what about all the other investments in a portfolio? In this session led by Andrea Armeni, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Transform Finance, we will focus on some of the more difficult-to-see ways in which endowments are inextricably linked to outcomes that negatively affect communities of color. Transform Finance, along with other experts in the field, will lead us into conversation to argue that capital has a long way to go in being a true ally – or even just not being a source of harm – for communities of color, and this starts with identifying where race shows up in a portfolio in less obvious ways. Panelists will provide a look at some examples that tie seemingly neutral investment decisions to harmful practices that exacerbate issues like the racial wealth gap, job quality, education, housing, and health. We will discuss some of the real actions investors can take – and also try to get some ideas from the audience on obstacles to this approach.
Speakers:
- Andrea Armeni, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Transform Finance
- Lisa Hayles, Investment Manager at Trillium Asset Management
- Renaye Manley, Board Member of Majority Action, the Council of Institutional Investors, and the Thirty Percent Coalition
Recording:
Resources referenced:
- How Investments Drive Injustice and What Investors Can Do About It | Transform Finance, September 2020
- Equity in the Boardroom: How Asset Manager Voting Shaped Corporate Action on Racial Justice in 2020 | Majority Action, 2020
- Racial Justice Investing Group - RJI is a coalition of investors, asset owners, and business leaders who are taking action for racial justice within our own organizations, as well as in our engagements with portfolio companies
- S&P 250 Workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Disclosure Scorecard | As You Sow
- Nasdaq filed a proposal with the SEC to require Nasdaq-listed companies to disclose diversity statistics & have at least 2 diverse directors | Nasdaq is getting tremendous push back on their diversity proposal. It's important for all investors to submit supportive comments to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at [email protected]. To reference the talking points that have been disseminated via the Thirty Percent Coalition, contact Kaede ([email protected]).