Effective Impact Investing

I’m excited to announce a blog post written in collaboration with Gabe Rissman of Stake and the Real Impact Tracker, on the Effective Altruism forum, entitled Effective Impact Investing.

A little background, as this links to a fairly obscure corner of the internet: in the distant past, I was a Philosophy major at Rutgers University where I became involved in the philosophy club and founded the Rutgers Undergraduate Philosophy Journal. Through my studies, I became involved with a group called Giving What We Can, which examined both the impact of our charitable dollars (much of which go to administrative overhead at various charities and is otherwise not put to work as donors expect). Bob and I have since been back to Rutgers to speak with this group. 

While I was studying Philosophy, my partner, Bob Goellner (then my financial advisor) introduced me to Sustainable, Responsible and Impact Investing, and how we can use Environmental, Social and Governance factors in the investment process, and I was struck by how I could align my investments with my values and use the power of money to create change in the world. I became a financial advisor due to my desire to help people plan for their futures and the legacy they leave behind – because future generations depend on the decisions we make today, both in terms of their finances and the impact of our investments on the planet and society.

At the end of last year, a philosopher named Hauke Hillebrandt made an argument that Impact investing is only a good idea in specific circumstances (originally titled: “Donating effectively is usually better than Impact Investing”) which I felt compelled to respond to. I’m proud of our response, and very pleased to work with Gabe, as his training at Yale and mine at Rutgers complemented each other nicely. The work we’ve produced together is written in an academic style and references a number of other academic studies as the forum it’s posted in requires, but it represents how we think about impact in our portfolios, and especially how much we value Shareholder Advocacy, where we use the power of active ownership to engage with the companies our clients own in their portfolios to change corporate behavior.

I invite you to read our entire post, and send us comments! We want to know what you think. The post can be found here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Rkr2W8ADSGwWXfRBF/effective-impact-investing

You can learn more about Gabe and his work here.