It’s here: our FUN, 3-minute film on mission aligned investing!
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Greetings, dear people,
It’s here: “Dollars That Make Sense!” Our FUN, 3-minute film on mission aligned investing is a fast ride, so buckle your seatbelt. Check out the cat host!
Click on the image to watch!
Special thanks to the SK2 Fund, the Arthur B. Schultz Foundation, and the Jessie duPont Fund for their leadership in the mission aligned space, including for sponsoring this film! Please put this film on your website and share it far and wide.
Warmly, Elizabeth
PS – If you want to see more exciting advocacy for MAI, please support this project by helping us meet our funding match from Halloran Philanthropies. The Patricia Kind Family Foundation has already joined the fun, but we are still $75,000 short in the match!
Chris Crothers, Director of Impact Investing
for the Jessie Ball duPont Fund
Chris has been mission-aligning the endowment for years, attracting other investors to shared projects, and disclosing the full endowment on the foundation’s 990-PFs.
PHOTO: Chris Crothers on the drums!
At work…
What inspired you to align your endowment with your mission? After losing $90 million of our endowment’s value in 90 days in 2008, the Great Recession made it clear to trustees that we needed to strive for impact beyond that of the distribution of 5% of our assets – the minimum required of private foundation for grantmaking and operations – and bring more of our resources to the table. We understood all along that we can’t control market influence on traditional invested assets, but the immediate financial hit to our grantmaking in the communities we care about elevated the interest in intentionally directing the other 95% of our invested assets toward mission and place.
What have been the biggest obstacles at your foundation for mission alignment? One of the greatest challenges we experienced early on was finding common ground with our investment advisor. Providing low-interest loans to CDFIs was a relatively easy sell, but we had to work through significant issues of assessing risk and aligning more of our traditional investment allocations with our values and mission. While we had access to several large-scale, established ESG vehicles previously vetted by the advisor, we struggled to find a path to support closely-aligned early-stage and place-based opportunities, which largely excluded us from investing in diverse-owned and -led fund managers.
How far along is your foundation in this journey? For a moderate-sized foundation (~$340 million in assets), I would describe us as well on our way. We launched a robust and successful Program-Related Investment (loan) pool that is generating positive local impact, defined verticals that are aligned with our mission and complement and supercharge our grantmaking, and developed the means to measure our impact as well as to emphasize transparency. We are not driven by an urgency to be 100% impact invested, but we look closely at the quality of the investments and impacts we hope to achieve. Currently, a little over 1/3 of our endowment is intentionally invested in Program- and Mission-Related Investments.
What’s next in your mission alignment? One of the Fund’s values is “Do better… always.” With this in mind, we’re working on several fronts;
Better and more efficient processes and tools to measure the impact of our investments;
We are intentionally seeking investments that diversify our portfolio with regard to driving capital where systemic social barriers have been impediments. Investing in women- and people of color-owned or led fund managers has been an area that we have been pushing ourselves and our advisors over the last several years; and
The Fund is also stretching to be even more responsive to needs and to be creative problem solvers. For example, we stood up the JAX Microfinance Fund from scratch, a microfinance fund for small business and consumer lending; we are actively filling in capital gaps with regard to government funding that is only deployed in arrears; and we are working with public and private partners to stand up a $40 million affordable housing fund for Jacksonville. These are areas where we did not have direct experience but jumped in the water with both feet, bringing our proven track record of being responsive to the communities we serve and our ability to convene the right partners at the right time.
What about perpetuity or spending down? Perpetuity and sunsetting are provocative subjects with pros and cons for each. I believe that donor intent matters, and Mrs. duPont chose to establish a perpetual trust. Her estate was valued just over $40M after her death in 1970, and the endowment has since grown to $350M. Since inception in 1976, the duPont Fund has distributed $441M in 11,000 grants. We are also leveraging our invested assets for impact through mission-aligned investing to complement our grantmaking and mission, which I’ve calculated to be about $135M. Combined these are significant investments that are in place to continually address the changing needs of the communities we care about.
What’s a favorite mission aligned investment of yours? I need to point to two, if I can. We provided LIFT JAX — a purpose built community nonprofit – a $900,000 construction loan to bring back a closed grocery store in a food desert in Jacksonville’s historic East Side neighborhood. In addition to renewed access to healthy foods, Deb’s Store will include workforce development training through Goodwill and a VyStar Credit Union branch that also provides financial coaching. The duPont Fund loan bridges the gaps in state and city funding that will be reimbursed once the project is completed. On the MRI side, I would point to Illumen Capital. We do not usually invest in funds-of-funds because of the fee structure, but we selected Illumen simply because it is seeking to influence how capital is invested among fund managers. Illumen invests in fund managers willing to undergo unconscious bias training, which aims at elevating equity and diversity in investment decisions as well as in the fund managers’ approaches to talent, promotion, and retention.
Have you ventured into shareholder advocacy? How so?! Not deeply — only through shareholder proxies (and likely not very effectively). More to come there, I hope.
What’s the most convincing thing to get others on board? I think the ability to show measurement and outcomes. Demonstrating and sharing examples of impact investments that achieve a clear positive result AND achieve a financial return can be convincing. There is so much noise about impact investing equating to concessionary or negative returns, that those of us in the space need to share our stories far and wide to dispel the myths.
After work…
Guilty pleasure: A handmade blood orange margarita by a pool.
Kickback film:The Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona. I met them by the way!
Last series you binge-watched: “Bloodline” on Netflix
Favorite caffeine source: Coffee
Sweet or salty: Sweet all the way.
Happy place: Behind my drum set playing live music with a band.
Animal friends: Ponce the hedgehog, Jinkies the cat, and Monty the banana ball python.
Childhood ambition: To be a professional drummer.
Adult ambition: To find enough time to take a nap.
Embarrassing moment: On my first trip with the president of the duPont Fund after I just started, I was seated in first class, and she was behind me in coach. I tried to switch but the attendant wasn’t having it.
Nickname: Cro’
Biggest challenge: I love to cook and eat so portion size is my nemesis.
Soundtrack of your life: I grew up selling music at a local music store until I started my own record store/bar in my 20s. I listen to music constantly and have over 6,000 songs on my phone right now. I’d say that curated list of music on my phone is indeed my soundtrack.
Music that lifts your spirits: New Orleans-influenced jazz / funk (e.g., the band Galactic)
Most unusual gift given: A framed cover of a magazine as a gag gift to a colleague. She had a visceral negative reaction to the cover image and, when she was leaving the duPont Fund, I had staff and board sign and gave the framed cover to her.
Most unusual gift received: An anonymous subscription to a self-improvement magazine.
Last splurge: Weights and a treadmill. Starting to piece together elements of a gym in my garage.
Invest with us...
Seeing carriage horses for tourists in center city Philadelphia – and around the world – working in all weather and traffic inspired Janet White’s FREe-CARRIAGES business. Our loan has allowed her to purchase her first electric carriage, which is now getting retrofitted to be street legal. Our hope is that this alternative will catch fire and become the popular alternative to using horses everywhere.
PHOTO: FREe-CARRIAGES offers a modern, environmentally friendly, cruelty-free, and innovative alternative called the electric horseless carriage (“e-carriage”) to replace the inhumane and hazardous horse-drawn carriages.
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