Photo by Marek Piwnicki
NorthLight Foundation strives to ensure our endowment is invested in 100% mission-aligned sectors.
Investments by the philanthropic sector — including those of NorthLight and its individual peers — can and do have a significant impact on the kinds of industries, companies, and values that succeed in the global economy. We realize that our endowment cannot be invested in sectors that perpetuate the same social and environmental injustices that our grantmaking seeks to remedy. As such, we made the decision to shift our endowment into sectors that further our commitment to racial and environmental justice, and align our investments with our mission.
With the guidance of a financial advisor, we continue to identify opportunities to leverage our investments in ways that not only avoid environmentally destructive and socially unjust industries, but also support environmentally sustainable and just alternatives. We developed investment policies to support these goals. Our investment policies aim to avoid support for sectors that contribute to climate change as well as sectors that disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. We look for ways to ensure that our investments generate wealth that will remain in communities that have suffered from racial injustice. This is distinct from typical practices in which financial institutions extract wealth and leave communities no better than before.
Our work resulted in multiple iterations of an investment policy statement, which has allowed us to achieve our goal of having a 100% mission-aligned endowment. Our investment policy statement, as of February 2021, is linked below. As we continue to learn and the field evolves, we anticipate that so too will our investment policy statement.