Sustainable and Impact Investing: Policies and Metrics of Success

‘There is no Planet B’

With each passing year, more and more wealthy families become sensitive to great challenges to the impact consumption, business and investment have on the world’s environmental, social and governance challenges.

In response, responsible investing has moved on from traditional negative screens on such industrial sectors as tobacco, alcohol and firearms to a more comprehensive and effective approach to investing with a measured impact on  their ‘ESG’ impact.

Today, while still using negative screens, many families are embracing a more comprehensive set of values, practices, and approaches that contribute to a more holistic and proactive approach to principled investing, which also aligns a family ’s investment practices more firmly with its core values and beliefs.

The most advanced thinkers in this space, both family and institutional, take an integrated approach to principled investment. They incorporate ethics and principles in their brand, hiring practices, internal documents and processes, selection frameworks and evaluation criteria, due diligence priorities, monitoring criteria, and governance. The approach is both quantitative and qualitative, providing actual numbers on a more comprehensive set of metrics and a broader dialogue on issues and ideas not captured in those metrics.

In essence, a more principled approach redefines “return” to embrace more inclusive measures of investment performance for both family businesses and family investments, going beyond the financial to embrace impact on the environment, community, and broad societal issues.

This effort to embed a broader agenda in family investment assessment and management, which has been variously defined and described as sustainable investing, venture philanthropy, ethical investing, principled investment management, and ‘philanthrocapitalism’, and usually incorporates financial, environmental, and community impact in its selection and return criteria.

Increasingly, the initiative to embed sustainability in all, or part of, a family’s investing activities can be a powerful bridge linking the rising generation to older members of the family.

Objectives

The objectives of this Core Course are to provide you with the concepts, options, frameworks, processes and approach necessary to define and implement your own successful program of sustainable and impact investing.