Home      Login

Abstract: 

The events of 2020—including the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice uprisings, and the climate crisis—are a call to action for foundations to deploy all their capital to help solve our global challenges. Family foundations make up over half of all private foundations and in the US alone hold over $400 billion in assets. By deploying their endowments into mission-aligned investments, family foundations can accelerate solutions faster than they could with grant making alone. Even small foundations can harness data, networks, and educational resources to invest their endowments to serve mission goals. This is easier to do than most foundations and their advisors assume. Impact investing—investing for measurable positive social and environmental impact—is becoming mainstream. More institutional investors are building ESG (environmental, social, and governance) portfolios and younger generations are primed to invest for good, so there’s a wealth of knowledge and models to draw on. The biggest barriers for most foundations are a handful of lingering misconceptions and a lack of support. This article examines these misconceptions and the realities, drawing from Toniic’s “T100 Focus Report: Foundations on the Road to 100%,” which compiles data from 18 foundation portfolios representing $1.7 billion in committed capital. It also provides strategies to align assets with mission and insights from family foundations that have successfully implemented impact investing strategies.

Keywords: ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Portfolios; Impact Investing Strategies

Affiliations:  1: Toniic; 2: Toniic.