Foundation Mission Investing Manager North Sky Capital Brings Leaders to the Twin Cities as a Sponsor of the US SIF Conference

North Sky Capital, a local leader in the field of mission investing and one of our partners, helped host and plan for the conference, which showcased the tangible effects of mission investing.

Successful and sustainable mission investing depends on finding an investment manager that aligns with your mission and values. You’re looking for a manager that pursues the positive social goals you seek through investing capital in companies that work toward your mission and reflect your values.

Since 2015 we’ve teamed with North Sky Capital through its Alliance Fund II. Through investments in renewable power, energy storage, efficiency, water, and waste projects, its series of clean-energy infrastructure funds have created approximately 1.8 million union job hours in the US and Canada. Read more about its approach in the 2018 North Sky Capital Impact Report.

Our investment in North Sky’s Alliance Fund II is one way we align with our grantmaking aims to advance work opportunity in the Foundation’s eight-state service region.

Convening mission investors.

North Sky was an early mover in the field of sustainable and responsible investing, and it continues to lead. One recent example is its co-sponsorship of “New Challenges, New Opportunities,” the ninth annual conference of US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment.

Minneapolis hosted this year’s conference from June 10–12. Until this year, it has always been held in either Washington, DC, or Chicago. Choosing Minneapolis as the 2019 conference location highlights the Twin Cities as another hub for sustainable, responsible, and impact (SRI) investing, an investment approach that weighs environmental, social, and corporate governance as key factors in long-term financial gain with a concurrent positive societal impact.

Representatives from investment firms, business, government, and nonprofits that take an SRI approach to investing gathered to cover a range of topics relevant to the growing field.

The yardstick of intentionality in mission investing.

According to Matthew Petterson, an analyst with North Sky, “The field of impact investing can trace its roots to religious organizations using a negative-screen approach to investing in the 1970s, filtering out investments they felt weren’t morally aligned with their mission—for example, the tobacco, alcohol, and gaming industries.”

When North Sky came onto the impact-investing landscape in 2005, Gretchen Postula, North Sky’s head of investor relations, was there. She points out that a renew-reuse-reduce logic centered on climate-change themes dominated the field’s thinking at that time. Investments focused on companies within energy generation and efficiency, transportation, water, recycling, and advanced building materials.

But today, she reflects, “Impact investing has a broader definition and centers on intentionality—being purposeful with your dollars and making them reflect your belief system overall.” That means investments in companies actively working to do good in the world, expanding the impact definition into the fields of education, energy storage, healthy living and aging, and sustainable agriculture, to name a few.

And concerns about values alignment are now taking into account important questions of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This resonates with our funding priorities and a current organizational exploration. Read more on our DEI page.

Market-rate returns without moral compromise.

North Sky’s approach to investing is delivering superior returns while advancing positive social and environmental impact. “Our investments always need to be competitive from a financial perspective,” Gretchen says. Positive, market-rate financial returns stand alongside its mission to invest in companies doing good in the world.

Aiming for an impact consideration in all investments.

The 2018 US SIF Trends Report states, Gretchen notes, that today one in four investment dollars has some kind of impact alignment. She believes that ratio will keep growing—hopefully leading to a time when decisions across all classes of investments will include impact alignment.