Editor’s note: This article is part of a continuing series in which Paul Ellis, a well-known advisor and consultant on sustainable investing strategies, interviews industry professionals on the topics of millennials and sustainable investing. What follows is an interview with two industry experts, Stephanie Cordes, vice-chair of the Cordes Foundation and Nexus Network member and Vanessa Grellet, chair of Nexus Working Group on Impact Investing.
Ellis: Stephanie, at the Nexus Impact Investing Group salon I attended recently at your home there were several asset managers speaking about their firms’ available strategies in impact investing.
Please give our readers some background on how the Cordes Foundation does impact investing.
Cordes: My parents started the family foundation in 2006 when my Dad sold his business, Asset Mark, to a global insurance company. The intention was and still is to use most of the foundation’s assets to create a bigger societal impact.
In 2008, we began raising the percentage of assets invested in impact strategies because they were outperforming the rest of our portfolio. In 2014, we decided to invest 100 percent of the foundation’s assets in impact strategies.
Since then, I have been leading our investments in ethical fashion and working within the artisan sector to find new opportunities.
Ellis: Vanessa, tell us how the Nexus Impact Investing Group started.
Grellet: Nexus is a 3,000 member global community of nextgen wealth holders and social entrepreneurs with growing demand for impact investing opportunities. Rachel Cohen Gerrol, one of our founders, asked me to create the Impact Investing Group within Nexus so we could respond to this demand.
Last year at our United Nations global summit, 50 members came together to brainstorm what we wanted to achieve and developed the Impact Investing Group’s three main goals. The first is to educate our members, the second is to empower them and the third is to enable them to collaborate with each other on investments.
Then we created a speaker series for our members to meet the leaders in the impact investing world. Our first salon was held at the SOCAP15, Social Capital Markets conference last year. This year, we’re having monthly meetings in cities in Europe and Latin America, as well as locations in the U.S. We partner with the major business conferences in the impact space and collaborate with universities and other institutions.
Ellis: Advisors often think that there are not enough impact strategies available to meet their clients’ needs for diversification and liquidity. Are they right?
Cordes: We invest across all asset classes and have increasingly found great opportunities that are aligned with our impact profile and risk/return objectives. These opportunities include public debt and equity as well as private debt and equity investments. I’m most excited about a recent private equity investment in an ethical fashion enterprise, Soko, based in Nairobi, which uses a technology platform enabling artisan staff to be more easily connected with merchants sourcing their products for direct shipment to retailers like Nordstrom. This increases by four times the wages the artisans receive, which they can reinvest in their business or apply to family needs.