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Sustainable Investing

A material impact area for our clients

Our Goal

Help our investor clients articulate and realize their vision for philanthropy, sustainable investing, and wealth-based planning, while leveraging Seedvest resources to support broader education and awareness around sustainable investing.

As an advisor to private business owners, individual families, and endowments and foundations, Seedvest focuses on helping clients achieve sustainable outcomes as they deploy their resources to influence the issues important to them. We believe that ESG investing does not mean investors sacrifice returns, and values must drive a client’s socially responsible investment plan. Now, more than ever, values, definitions, and goals related to sustainable investing are a focus for many clients, but also highly personal. Since there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, we view sustainable investing not as a product, but as an approach.

To help clients navigate these complex decisions, Seedvest starts each relationship with a robust conversation about each client’s values and objectives. We then use those values as our guiding principles, advising our clients in their pursuit of thriving families, sustainable portfolios, and impactful philanthropy – according to their definition of success. We are committed to the evaluation of ESG factors as part of our investment research process in order to help us effectively assess the long-term sustainability and durability of our companies.

We seek to be owners of high-quality sustainable companies that can generate superior long-term returns. Our managers look for businesses that can ‘do well’ by focusing on robust ESG practices that allow them to ‘do good’ for all stakeholders.

Core Program Components

  • We are committed to the evaluation of ESG factors as part of our investment research process because it helps us effectively assess the long-term sustainability and durability of the companies we invest in.
  • We take a bottom-up fundamental approach to investing, identifying businesses that have the potential to compound capital through market cycles and make effective management decisions that lead to strong governance, key stakeholder relationships, and excellent social practices.
  • We help clients realize socially responsible investment (SRI) mandates through portfolio customization, ongoing analysis, shareholder engagement, and integration of MSCI ESG Research data points through a sustainable portfolio optimization process.

  • Our proprietary values-based planning framework helps clients uncover their values and use them to make decisions about how wealth is invested, saved, spent, and given away.
  • We work with families to create customized programs that demonstrate how how their values can drive decision-making in regards to investing, planning, and charitable giving.

  • We strive to help clients become strategic philanthropists by defining the role of philanthropy in the client’s life and the estate plan, setting structure to maximize impacts, creating a framework for governance/administration, and crafting a strategic plan to design grants and measure impact.
  • We support the process by helping donors investigate innovative ways of structuring charitable activities, including hybrid vehicles.

PRI

Seedvest Investment Management became a signatory in 2020.

100 %

of third-party managers evaluated against ESG criteria in annual reviews

33 %

of new Capital Partners investments in companies are substantially owned or led by a woman or BIPOC