Our very own James Frazier is a movie star! Well, maybe he’s not the only one who can point to an online video with pride, but we’re excited to see him sharing his great work as part of a vibrant community economy in his home town of Port Townsend, Washington. Port Townsend is home to LION: the Local Investing Opportunities Network, which allows local citizens to make loans to local small businesses. The work was featured on Peak Moment TV, which features video journalism on “locally reliant living for challenging times,” and on Treehugger. You can check out James’ star turn — we mean, thoughtful and forward-looking comments — on either of those sites, or right here:
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Contact UsPlease contact us for a free consultation to see how we can help you create a personalized portfolio that supports a just and sustainable society. Call us at 1-800-793-7512, click here to send us an email, or click below to reach one of our offices directly. CaliforniaHawaiiLatest PostsUN hosts meeting on ...In early April, 650 leaders from around the world met at the UN in New York for ...
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Andy Loving has once again received national recognition for his compelling approach to investing and investment advising. This time, the kudos came from Financial Planning magazine, which just named the winners of its second annual Influencer Awards. The editors of Financial Planning chose Influencers in four categories, and, as they note, “we felt compelled to name several notables alongside the winners given how strong some nominees were.” Andy was named the Notable advisor for the Practice Management Influencer Award, based on “his work incorporating community impact investments in portfolios.” As you may know, Andy’s been recognized for years for his work with issues of justice, money, and faith; last spring he was featured in a USA Today column on Christianity and capitalism. If you believe that positive change in the world must include fundamental changes in our economy and how we do business, and if you believe that the most power we have to affect real change lies right where we live, in our local communities, then you should know about the Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE, pronounced “ball-ey”). BALLE is a consortium of business networks spread across the USA and Canada. Each of these networks brings together the green, sustainable, locally-focused businesses of a given region. Each network is independent and autonomous, focusing on the unique resources, culture, and challenges of its area. BALLE acts as a forum for all of these green business networks to share information, encourage each other, and coordinate their agendas.
It sounds simple, but that’s probably where the beauty is. By linking together over 22,000 small businesses across the continent, BALLE has turned what would otherwise be lots of well-intentioned but unconnected green businesses into a force for advancing local, sustainable, human-scale business practices in the world, starting at the grassroots level. According to its website, “BALLE believes that local, independent businesses are among our most potent change agents, uniquely prepared to take on the challenges of the twenty-first century with an agility, sense of place, and relationship-based approach others lack.” In today’s globalized world, where it seems that big, abstract entities such as nations and corporations dominate the news and control the agenda, why do small, local economies and businesses even matter at all? To name a few reasons: Among our goals in managing client accounts is to maintain broad diversification among investment types, since each is expected to perform well during different stages of economic and business cycles. In investment terms, we say it’s good to include a variety of investments with a “low correlation” to the others. Utility industries are known to have a fairly low correlation with the broader stock market, so are especially useful in this regard. Utility industries include water, telecommunications, industrial materials, and energy. The ways we produce energy have come into painful focus recently as Japan and the world deal with the consequences of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on Japan’s northeastern coast. At Natural Investments, we have long eschewed any investment in the nuclear energy and weapons industries. The risks to human and ecological welfare in this industry are enormous. Further, we believe that no reasonable business case can be made for investment in nuclear facilities due to the expenses involved in building and maintaining them. And with so many alternative energy sources gaining in accessibility and efficiency, nuclear simply makes no sense (see Hal’s recent post for more on this).
Fortunately, there is an excellent investment vehicle that allows us to provide our clients with exposure to the mainstream Utilities sector with no nuclear investments at all – the Flex Utilities and Infrastructure Fund (until a name change in early 2011, it was called the Flex Total Return Utilities Fund). The fund has outperformed the Russell 3000 Utilities Index over the last 1, 3, 5 and 10 years. The Flex UI Fund gives clients a stake in more established utilities, such as water systems and electric utilities, as well as its high proportion (about 30%) of holdings in the growing telecommunications and internet infrastructure sector. While like many mutual funds, it’s not totally “pure,” with smaller holdings in oil and gas pipelines and exploration, we feel that it serves a valuable purpose in diversification. The Flex Utilities and Infrastructure Fund is an example of how we as investors can direct our capital away from dangerous and dated energy technologies such as nuclear, while taking responsible steps to balance our portfolios with a mix of innovative and established industries. For more info, follow these links to the Flex Funds family of funds and an info sheet on the UI Fund This article first appeared in the Spring 2011 Natural Investments News Impact Investment , what Natural Investments has termed Regenerative Investment, is an emerging market that is becoming recognized as a new asset class in its own right. It’s generally defined as direct investment aimed at solving social or environmental challenges while generating financial profit. It differentiates itself within the arena of Socially Responsible Investment in that Impact Investment is proactive, direct investment in positive solution-oriented enterprise and largely separate from standard stock market investments, including mutual funds. Impact investment is gaining attention as a key piece of the puzzle in solving social and environmental crises. But, still in its infancy, there’s a continuing need to develop the landscape of Impact Investing on many levels. Investors need to hear about it, understand how it works, and have a means to evaluate the myriad of opportunities in terms of both financial and social performance. Investors, Social Finance intermediaries, and those organizations and companies doing the work of addressing critical problems in the world are working together to develop organizational capacity and build an infrastructure that can support a flow of new investment capital into this area; some estimate that up to one trillion dollars could flow into these high-impact opportunities over the next ten years.
An exciting new arrival to the Impact Investing landscape is Mission Markets. Mission Markets is a first-of-its-kind on-line platform connecting high net-worth individuals and institutional investors with a growing number of investment offerings from organizations and enterprises that are directly addressing social and environmental problems. Mission Markets was founded by Michael Van Patten and Steve Rocco, both of whom have extensive expertise in traditional capital markets coupled with a passion for advancing social welfare and environmental conservation. Michael has described the turning point in his life when he realized that all the time and energy he’d devoted to financial markets on Wall Street served no meaningful value; he then turned his efforts toward creating a career path that would allow him to use his expertise to make a positive change in the world for those who really needed it. Determined to make a difference, In a recent NI newsletter, Malaika Maphalala highlighted the great work being done by Mission Markets to link high net-worth investors with impact investments around the world. In August, Mission Markets featured an in-depth interview with Malaika on their website, which we urge you to explore. We’re pleased to share that with you here.
Malaika Maphalala is a financial advisor with Natural Investments, a national SEC registered Investment Advisory firm that has specialized in exclusively socially responsible and ethical investing for over 25 years. A lifelong advocate for social change, Malaika is driven by a passion for finding innovative approaches to bringing people and resources together to address social and environmental complexities. Prior to her work with Natural Investments, Malaika spent 10 years in the non-profit sector as an independent consultant providing administrative, development and program management services for numerous socially driven organizations in Hawaii and Oregon. She was also a co-founder of Dragon’s Eye Learning Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that has provided ongoing programming in the arts, alternative education, and sustainable agriculture from its rural, 40+ acre farm-based site since 2001. After transitioning to the field of finance, Malaika worked as the Business Manager for a private investment firm specializing in foreign currency trading where she worked directly with high net-worth investors and developed and managed fiscal tracking systems. An important aspect of her work included helping the firm develop its goals to commit a portion of profits for social good. Q: How do you define impact investment and what does it mean to you? Impact investing is about more and more people realizing that enterprise and market driven dollars coupled with social/environmental mission can offer the needed scale, power and speed to create deep and lasting social change. I think the tremendous success of Microfinance as developed by the Grameen Bank, really opened people’s eyes to the possibility and power of using investment dollars as opposed to charity to drive social innovation and positive change. Impact investing has a very wide spectrum, and can be small scale to large, local to global. I believe it is critical for communities to invest in their own development, moving more resources into local ownership. On a more global scale we can invest in things like clean energy, microfinance, and sustainable agriculture. By Greg Garvan No matter what year it is, or whether the stock market is up or down, retirement planning is a crucial aspect of your life planning. I wish I had a silver bullet for that would target a perfect plan for all, but lacking that, here are two things can help create a more “successful” experience when it comes time to retire and live off what you’ve saved. It’s never too early to start on these two steps, and if you do, I can almost promise a better life-after-work.
Adjust your sights now, and those decades of work-free time will be all the sweeter. Want to know more about financial life-planning, now and for later in life? Email me and I’ll be glad to help you move forward.
By Jim Cummings What an amazing visualization of the impact, and even more important, the exchange that takes place though Kiva’s network. As you may know (you DO know if you’re a regular reader of NI’s newsletter!), Kiva is an online network that allows individuals to offer microloans directly to specific loan recipients in the third world. Enough words: this video says it all! Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance from Kiva Microfunds on Vimeo.
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By Hal Brill I’m not much of a football fan, but around playoff time I perk up and start rooting for underdog teams to dethrone the champs. With all the problems that Big Energy has been having lately, the odds of upsets in the energy games have been steadily increasing. Japan is on everyone’s mind. Despite the shocking destruction caused by the massive quake/tsunami, our attention has been on the radiation leaking from Fukushima Daiichi. We’re all praying the damage to the environment and human health can be contained, but it’s too early to know. This event has made it impossible to ignore the consequences of nuclear accidents, and has already had in impact on the future of nuclear energy.
Socially responsible investors have long had this on their radar. In our 1992 book Investing from the Heart, Jack Brill wrote that “most SRI investments are screened for nuclear energy. The reasons are not exclusively environmental, because nuclear power plants have also proven to be financial black holes for the utilities that built them.” Twenty years later nuclear is still a standard negative screen for SRI funds, though recently some former opponents of nuclear power have become converts. Nuclear plants do not emit CO2, so many people who are deeply concerned about global warming have reluctantly embraced nukes as a necessary path towards stabilizing the climate. NI continues to recommend avoiding investments in nuclear power. Accident safety hasn’t been adequately addressed, and the lack of safe, permanent solutions for radioactive waste has been a deal killer for us. I’ve always felt it was a wacky way to boil water, but I’ve tried to keep an open mind. President Obama surprised progressives with his vision of a new generation of smaller, safer nuclear plants. Still, private investors have been unwilling to invest in nuclear power, despite huge government subsidies and limitations on liability for accidents. If nuclear power is eliminated from our near-term future, how exactly will we meet energy demands without cooking the planet?
Posted in By Hal Brill, Global Issues, Green Living, The Economy
Tagged energy, global, Green Investing, socially responsible investing, sri, sustainability
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Evolving capitalism is a long-term process, and quite a roller-coaster ride, so each victory along the way is all the more meaningful. After spending a year with other SRI colleagues in dialogue with senior Costco management, I am thrilled to share that our efforts on your behalf have led Costco to adopt its first sustainable seafood policy, addressing a variety of policy, supply chain, labeling, and endangered species issues. Costco is the largest retailer of seafood in the U.S., so this policy change will have a significant impact on the health of fragile global fisheries, and will spur immediate changes in the practices of every supplier of seafood to the company. Costco is limiting purchases of 12 endangered species, including Atlantic cod, Chilean sea bass, bluefin tuna, grouper, shark, orange roughy, monkfish, and Atlantic halibut, and will require that shrimp and other fish farmers comply with sustainability standards defined by non-governmental organizations in collaboration with global government and industry leaders. Costco’s policy states that the company will purchase the 12 endangered species only if they are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), the most widely-respected independent certifier of sustainable fisheries. Foremost on shareholders’ minds when approaching Costco was the desire to see adoption of a formal sustainability policy to guide all aspects of procurement, set targets for the achievement of sustainability goals, ensure the availability of “sustainable” choices for customers, and avoid the sale of unsustainable seafood products, including endangered and other over-harvested species. We requested that Costco define its sustainability goals, establish regular reviews of fisheries at great risk, and use practices that will mitigate or limit environmental impacts associated with aquaculture. The resulting policy changes begins to address all these concerns.
Posted in Advocacy, By Michael Kramer, Global Issues
Tagged corporate responsibility, food, sustainability
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By Jim Cummings This week’s Sunday Times features a profile of Jeremy Grantham, one of the country’s more successful asset managers, whose last two quarterly letters to investors (widely read in the financial world) have shed some decidedly mainstream light on ideas that will be familiar to NI clients. In particular, he’s stressing that we’ve overshot the earth’s carrying capacity, and that we’re entering an era of limited growth potential, driven largely by the fact that natural resources of all kinds are no longer simply there for the taking – we’re not talking just peak oil, but “peak everything,” from metals to key agricultural nutrients like potassium and phosphorus. On a practical level, Grantham sees commodity prices rising nearly across the board (so urges buying in now); on a social level, he feels the US 2010 Congress missed what may be our best opportunity to address global warming, but notes that “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change. Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.” He believes this shift in emphasis plays to Americans’ strength. “Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.” The Times article goes on to note:
Posted in Global Issues, The Economy
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Is your life humming along as you’d like it to? Do you whistle while you work? Do you need any fine-tuning? Do you march to the sound of a different drummer? Can you think of another clever auditory-alignment phrase about the quality of your life? If so, I’d love to hear it! In this article, I’m introducing a new mental model to the basket of tools we use in the strategic insight aspect of Holistic Financial Planning (HFP). As you might recall (and if you don’t, please email me for past articles), in HFP we have several phases, like developing a holistic goal, planning income, planning expenses, planning for profit, and monitoring towards success. The strategic insight mode hovers, in a sense, above all of the others. It’s a collection of tools and mental models that we grab occasionally to help make rapid progress toward our goal. Strategic insight models covered previously in these pages include looking for logjams, evaluating the weak link in your chain of profitability, and using the wheel of life to identify shortcomings.
I call my latest playful process “Fine Tune Your Life,” and it’s based on the idea of an equalizer used by DJs and sound engineers. If you have an audiophile friend you’ve likely seen an equalizer, with its many sliders and dials that precisely tune musical output. People often think in terms of “on-off,” like a light switch, but in reality the fuzzy details of life are not “on-off” – they move through a range within many possible variables. Take something like health for example; you’re not either healthy or unhealthy. There are many factors to be evaluated to make a diagnosis: weight, resting heart rate, body fat percentage, triglyceride levels, etc, etc. The same is true for financial well-being. Continue reading By Jim Cummings
Here at Natural Investing, we’ve been mighty inspired by the Slow Money movement from the moment Woody Tasch began sharing his earliest ponderings. So we’re especially excited to be one of several sponsors of the 3rd Slow Money National Gathering, taking place in San Francisco this fall. Here’s how they describe themselves: Join this emerging network of thought leaders, investors, donors, entrepreneurs, farmers, and activists for our Third National Gathering this October in San Francisco, and collaborate with folks from around the country who are finding new ways to connect money, culture and the soil. Hal loved the first national gathering, which he wrote about here. We encourage our clients and readers to join Natural Investing’s Christopher Peck in San Francisco for this year’s event! Click on through here for more details. And, check this link for a collection of Natural Investing Blog posts that have featured Slow Money on both the national and local levels.
Posted in Green Living, Leading Edge Developments
Tagged Community Investing, farming, food, Green Investing
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Two emerging proxy voting websites are having an impact on shareholder activism, causing companies to take notice. This year marks the first proxy season that both ProxyDemocracy. org and MoxyVote.com are up and running. These websites aim to increase participation in the proxy voting process, particularly among retail investors, and early results show at least some success. While most retail investors don’t vote their proxy, if they begin to show a willingness to do so, activists and management will be clamoring for their votes. ProxyDemocracy.org, which went live in mid-2008, follows the proxy voting records of ten public and union pension funds and socially responsible mutual funds prior to companies’ annual meetings. The purpose is to allow individual investors to see how funds are voting on certain issues to help them make educated decisions in their own proxy voting. MoxyVote.com, launched last November, also publishes the voting records of institutional investors and other special interest groups before annual meetings. More transformationally, Moxy Vote allows investors to cast their proxy votes on its website. As an example of its impact, Moxy Vote ‘s website processed more than 22 million shares, or about 12% of On2’s outstanding shares, against On2’s proposed acquisition by Google. This prompted Google to raise its share price from 60 cents to 75 cents, leading to approval of the deal. By Hal Brill Those of you who have followed my columns over the years know that Allison and I started a green “intentional neighborhood” here in Paonia back in 2001 (www.hawkshavenllc.com). Since my name, Hal, is forever associated with the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I should have suspected that I was embarking on a green development odyssey. After nine years of jumping through hoops, we’re finally moving some dirt. This year’s project is a super-insulated, earth-bermed garage and upstairs studio, crowned with a 3 kilowatt solar system. We’re psyched! Before we design and build the main house, we need to get up to speed on what’s new in the world of eco-home building. So I signed up for a Natural Building conference focused on creating high-performance homes using earthen, plant- based, or recycled materials. What I came away with was not so much new building techniques, but a renewed commitment to living lightly on the planet.
Of course buildings are just one piece of the solution. Pretty much every human activity needs to undergo a similar trans- formation. This seems enormous – and it is! – but I humbly offer one insight about how this could happen: Everything we see in the human-made world began as an investment. The tools of Natural Investing, if widely applied, would shift the economy towards one that values long-term ecological health. To paraphrase Gandhi, we need to invest in the change we wish to see in the world. Udall next touched on other trends that might alter the bleak greenhouse gas forecast. Continue reading |
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