Advancing Faith Values Through Impact Investing: A Short Guide for Faith Investors and their Financial Advisors
Recently, we traveled to Orlando to attend the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) 70th Anniversary event, where we debuted our updated guide to impact investing for faith investors.
The event brought together women and men from religious orders in Canada, the United States, and Latin America, organized around the theme “Many Charisms, One Spirit, One Call”. Calvert Impact has partnered with faith communities for decades and the event embodied the aspects of working with faith investors that we appreciate so much: a celebration of both diversity and unity, and a desire to respond comprehensively to the urgent, changing needs of the world.
Many investors step back from more nontraditional investments when the world gets especially uncertain, but faith investors tend to step up, and they’ve been doing so for centuries. Religious institutions were some of the earliest impact investors using their portfolios to promote environmental stewardship, human dignity and flourishing and have shaped the impact market we know today.
At the LCWR we heard from novices eager to explore how their communities could begin an impact investing journey and old hands looking to go deeper into new sectors and asset classes. Faith-based investors are natural leaders of the impact investing movement and we view our role at Calvert Impact as helping to provide examples of how they might pursue impact investing.
In that spirit we’ve recently updated our guide to impact investing for faith investors. This guide was written five years ago for religious institutions and their investment professionals as an introduction to impact investing and the opportunity it presents for their portfolios. Since then, the impact investing market has grown significantly. According to the GIIN, impact AUM has seen a 21% compound annual growth rate over the past six years, with an 11% increase in the past year alone.
