In addition to big hats, friendly people and great barbecue, Texas is probably most associated with the fossil fuel industry—in particular, the gush of the oil well in the vast, productive Permian basin and the west and the buzz of refining and shipping terminals in Houston and the east.

But in the beating heart of oil country, environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investing is taking hold, said Chris Knapp, Robertson Stephens managing director, who in February helped open the RIA’s Houston office.

“ESG is now in the mainstream, while five to six years ago it seemed exotic,” said Knapp, who works with many high- and ultra-high-net-worth, multigenerational clients. “People love to do studies on wealth creation and wealth participation and why families go from shirtsleeves to shirtless in three generations. A lot of the reasons that family wealth dissipates is a lack of a cohesive investment philosophy that can be shared across generations.”

That’s why Robertson Stephens charged Knapp with creating a Texas-based office with a specialization in ESG investing.

Knapp came to ESG through personal and professional experience. On the personal side, he grew up in a family of community bankers in Houston and grew up with an appreciation for the role that access to credit plays in creating jobs and prosperity in communities. As he went to work in the wealth management industry at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), he came into contact with faith-based investors and other groups that wanted their portfolios screened for social responsibility at an early stage in his career.

Then, in 1996, Knapp co-founded Chilton Capital Management, which has since blossomed into a nearly $1.6 billion RIA powerhouse. While there, a client came to him with an interest in more socially conscious investing, and he was exposed to the world of micro-financing and micro-lending, which harkened back to his knowledge of community banking.

“I landed on a team of guys who were lending to women in emerging markets, who showed that you could build a scalable, core process microlending model, and that became my first move from traditional office investments to ESG,” said Knapp. “When 2008 and 2009 happened, this happened to be one of our best performing investments during that period, the default rate was zero. That was my personal epiphany.”

When Knapp discovered methods and managers applying positive investment screens—including and assigning more weight to companies that had sound ESG practices—he realized that investing for both ESG and financial returns simultaneously was going to be the future, and that he had plenty of reasons to bring prospects and clients into the ESG conversation.

Personally, Knapp started to become interested in urban green spaces and parks, soon recognizing that creating and maintaining these spaces required a tremendous collaboration of professionals with different types of expertise, including government, science, finance, health, design and construction. He became interested in translating this collaborative concept to investing and wealth management.

To that end, Knapp in 2016 founded Collaboration Capital, a wealth management and investment firm founded on ESG strategies created by collaborations of professionals with different expertise to address problems like climate change, equality and water quality.

Now, Knapp challenges the assumption that Texans have been somehow hostile towards ESG principles.

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