People older than 40 might remember watching "The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau," the acclaimed television documentary series that ran from 1968 through 1976 and starred the famed French oceanographer and his crew aboard the Calypso. Soon, people will be able to invest in an exchange-traded fund linked to Cousteau's grandson.

In July, AdvisorShares Investments LLC announced it formed a partnership with Philippe Cousteau Jr. to develop the AdvisorShares Global Echo ETF (NYSE Arca:GIVE). AdvisorShares says the fund will be the first multi-manager ETF with an absolute return and sustainable investment mandate.

Bethesda, Md.-based AdvisorShares currently has ten actively-managed ETFs on the market with more than $360 million in assets under management. The company says the Global Echo fund, which filed its registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 15, is one of four actively-managed ETFs in it's pipeline.

Part of the fund's management fee will help finance the Global Echo Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation recently co-founded by Cousteau that's slated to launch later this year. The foundation aims to fund solutions for various social causes ranging from women's and children's issues to environmental protection and social entrepreneurship. The ETF's management fee wasn't specified in the SEC filing.

According to its filing, the fund is designed as a core allocation in investments that might socially and environmentally benefit the planet in areas such as water, clean energy, community development, innovation and other sustainable themes.

Given its broad mandate, the fund might be hard to pin down from a style box perspective. The filing says the fund will invest across various assets classes, including U.S. and foreign equities and fixed income, and may take long and short positions. Additionally, the fund will be agnostic regarding capitalization ranges and investment styles.

"That's a challenge from a distribution perspective because financial advisors look at that [cap sizes and investment styles]," says James Carl, AdvisorShares' vice president of business development. "But we see this as a core holding because it's broadly diversified and designed to do well in any kind of market. And that's how we will position it when we get to the marketing stage."

AdvisorShares will start marketing the product this autumn after it's out of its registration filing period. Carl says the fund's launch date will likely be in this year's fourth quarter or next year's first quarter.

Financials, Not Fish

For Cousteau, 31, this is his first foray into the financial world. His father, Philippe Cousteau Sr., was a noted documentary film maker and Jacques Cousteau's right-hand man before he was killed in a plane accident in 1979, roughly seven months before his son's birth.

The younger Cousteau co-founded EarthEcho International, a nonprofit environmental educational group, and Azure Worldwide, an environmental design, development and marketing company.

Now living in the Washington, D.C. area, Cousteau says his partnership with AdvisorShares evolved over two years of discussions with various people in the financial world. "I was lamenting to a friend who's an investment guy about how difficult it is for nonprofits to raise money in a recession, and about the lack of resources available to tackle global challenges," he recalls.

His friend suggested tapping into Wall Street, and Cousteau began researching different types of funding vehicles including private equity, hedge funds and angel venture funds.

Cousteau was introduced to AdvisorShares through an investment manager he knows, and the two sides met informally. AdvisorShares told Cousteau they wanted to do something in the sustainable investing space, and Cousteau warmed to the idea of funding his project through an ETF.

"I wanted something I worked in to be accessible to everybody, and not something available just for accredited investors," Cousteau says. "It's not what the [Cousteau] legacy is all about. I liked the egalitarian nature of ETFs, and their ease of use and transparency."

Active Management

For AdvisorShares, the partnership with Cousteau jibes with its goal to not create cooke-cutter ETFs. "We don't want to bring out plain Jane, style box types of products because it's a competitive environment," Carl says.

AdvisorShares' forte is working with investment managers to bring their strategies to market in the form of ETFs.

Carl says Cousteau will play no active role in the fund's investment management, but instead will be more of an educational resource and ambassador for the fund. "He knows about environmental and sustainable ventures, as well as philanthropic efforts and social entrepreneurship," he says.

The Global Echo ETF will have four subadvisors. First Affirmative Financial Network LLC in Colorado Springs, Colo. will handle alternative long/short and hedging strategies, along with asset allocation.

Reynders, McVeigh Capital Management LLC in Boston and Baldwin Brothers Inc. in Marion, Mass. will be responsible for core equity strategies, while Community Capital Management Inc. in Weston, Fla. will cover core fixed income strategies. The fund will be distributed by Foreside Fund Services LLC in Portland, Me.

Lofty Goals

Cousteau says he expects the bulk of the funding for his newly-formed Global Echo Foundation will come from the Global Echo ETF management fee. When discussing the foundation's mission, he says he remembers growing up and hearing his grandfather talk about the importance of empowering women as a foundation for creating social sustainability, which he linked to environmental sustainability.

"A lot of microcredit programs during the past couple of decades have born this out--that women are a better investment than men are," Cousteau says.

Cousteau aims to fund programs that help educate women. That, he says, gives them greater control over family planning, enabling them to better feed their children and provide them with an education, which in turn improves their communities. "And that impacts environmental health," he says.

Cousteau adds that his foundation will tackle various environmental issues such as ocean acidification and deforestation, and will make microenterprise investments to spur economic development in poor communities. He says the Global Echo Foundation's goal is to spend most of its money every year, and not just collect money and grow.

"We have to spend the money now because we have to find solutions to global problems within the next 50 years," he says.

Standing Out From The Crowd

The ETF market already has a number of products that are focused on a certain aspect of the "green" universe such as water, solar or wind, while others fall under the rubric of clean energy or clean tech. But Morningstar ETF analyst Robert Goldsborough says the Global Echo ETF's broad diversification--both in terms of the areas it will invest in and how the fund is structured across different asset classes, cap sizes and investment styles--could help differentiate it from the crowd.

And he believes there should be a market for this product due to the success of existing socially-responsible, sustainability-themed funds. "This [Global Echo ETF] should succeed if it can generate any kind of track record," Goldsborough says.

And the fund's affiliation with the Cousteau name gives it a certain cache. "In some respects, the Cousteau name is a brand that's well regarded by the types of investors they'd be looking to attract," Goldsborough says.