The USCII has performed in-line with the S&P 500 Index since inception and slightly outperformed in the 5-year period ended December 2017. Jason, CIO at Work Capital, came from US Trust where he was the architect and manager of their sustainable investing strategies. Work Capital assumed portfolio management and distribution responsibilities for the USCII in February 2018.

“My resume looks like that of a millennial,” quips McDonald, who has followed her business judgement instincts to take on leadership roles at various firms over the past 20 years, including Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, the Clinton Foundation and ImpactAssets. Like other women leaders I’ve interviewed, this process led to her current role along with the passionate belief that mass affluent investors should be more focused on financing a civil society that has less impact on planetary resources and provides more diverse work opportunities for all.

To bring mass affluent investors into the impact investing process, McDonald believes “it’s critical for financial advisors to engage with their clients on the purpose of their money.” For McDonald, the practical aspects of mission-focused portfolio strategies, whether these are strictly balance-sheet driven, or include philanthropic motives, should be part of the advisor/client dialogue.

Good Leaders Are Good Listeners    

Alyssa Greenspan began her career with Community Capital Management Inc. (CCM), 15 years ago as a portfolio manager and is now president and chief operating officer. She knows pretty much everything about how CCM manages $2.5 billion in fixed-income ESG/impact and fossil-free portfolios, as well as the daily details of the firm’s business plan for building relationships with investors and the financial advisor community.  

In my conversation with Greenspan, we focused on how she has become a leader in getting the impact investing message out to the financial advisor community. She was clear that one of the biggest challenges in ESG/Impact investing right now is “having the bandwidth to tell your story to financial advisors and their investor clients.”

I was particularly interested in CCM’s innovative way of using social media to address this challenge. Greenspan credits two of her colleagues, and stressed the importance of being a good listener and encouraging employees to share their best ideas. One associate, tasked with expanding CCM’s business and social media outreach to investors and financial advisors, started regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter about the “use of proceeds” impact bond investments that the firm has participated in capitalizing for shareholders. When a colleague suggested highlighting what these organizations are doing by giving an award for the best impact investing story of the year, Greenspan loved the idea.

In 2017, the firm launched CCM’s Annual Impact Awards. Readers vote on which impact story they like best, and the winner receives a $10,000 donation from CCM to further its community impact mission. These are success stories that advisors can tell clients and that demonstrate, as Greenspan said, CCM’s pioneering impact research “identifying, recording, and tracking the underlying environmental and social outcomes of every security in our portfolios.”