Our Mission-Investing Partner that Achieves High Social and Economic Returns: Granite Equity Releases 2018 Annual Report

While investing in rural Minnesota businesses, Granite Equity Partners shows how enhanced community prosperity and well-being drive profits.

A portion of our mission-investing funds goes to Granite Equity Partners, which invests that capital in businesses in under-resourced communities of rural Minnesota. It’s a synergy of shared ideals and goals. Both we and Granite Equity aim to help rural Minnesotans build a secure future for their families and communities by keeping successful businesses in rural areas.

How Granite Equity’s focus on social impacts helps drive profits, too.

For Granite Equity, well-being leads the way. The equity firm takes a holistic and long-term approach to career, social, financial, physical, and community well-being. And that approach drove a record gross profit of $159.7 million in 2018 (a 6.3 percent increase over 2017).

But the firm looks beyond profit to the larger goal of investing in people. It funds a portfolio of companies that support their employees and their communities through high-quality jobs that offer living wages, fair benefits, and financial security. Last year portfolio companies secured 1,744 total jobs in the communities of rural Minnesota. Between 2004 and 2018, Granite Equity demonstrated a 12.9 percent compound annual growth rate in quality jobs secured—a stark contrast to the national average of 1.3 percent. The annual report also explains how portfolio companies measured their expanded social impact and community benefit.

Investment principles focus on the well-being of rural Minnesota communities.

Granite Equity puts $437.9 million in total investments to work in under-resourced communities in rural Minnesota, and this level of funding and the accompanying attention to social impact are reasons why we will have invested $5 million in mission investments in Granite Equity as of May 2019.