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.