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Please 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 or click here to send us an email.
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Home  What is Natural Investing?
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What is Natural Investing? |
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Natural Investing is for Everyone!
At Natural Investments we believe that most people want to be helpful and kind, and that most want to leave the world a better place for their children and future generations. We believe that these qualities are "natural", and that it is natural to include these basic human tendencies in every decision. We define "Natural Investing" as actively seeking to balance the need for financial return with the yearning to make life a little better for others and the Earth.
We serve clients large and small with customized portfolios that fulfill each person's social and environmental concerns. To do this, we work with mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other instruments, using three natural investment strategies:
Community Investing - puts money into the hands of local people who are building economic justice in communities around the world.
Corporate Investing - avoids companies and industries that do harm, seeks companies that work for a better world, and uses shareholder activism to change companies from the inside.
Regenerative Investing - the next generation of natural investing, financing deep green sustainability and social justice enterprises.
We are excited to be pushing the edge of the socially responsible investment world, building on two decades of investment success and innovating for a better world. Join us, and together we can help create the world we all want to live in!
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The Corporate Conundrum
There is hardly a more polarizing term in the economic arena than CORPORATION. For Wall Street's proud capitalists, corporations are revered as humanity's greatest invention, a brilliant way to pool capital and talent so that the needs of society can be met in an efficient manner. But for others - including many progressive thinkers - the mention of "the C-word" conjures images of greedy executives conniving to extract maximum profit, with nary a thought for the destruction of the planet and abuse of workers.
Natural Investments takes a more engaged approach to this complex topic. We start with the simple awareness that - like it or not - corporations are the dominant player on the economic stage. The history of the corporation (see chapter 1 of our book, Investing with Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference, 2000) has been one of increasing corporate influence over every aspect of life... even our government.
Do aspects of the corporate agenda endanger our democracy, social justice, and the global environment? Absolutely.
But corporations have also given us amazing technologies, medical advances, and - for at least a small portion of the world's population - a superb quality of life. Each of us, as investors, consumers, and citizens, must be conscious of how we interact with corporations.
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Read more: Corporate Investing
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Community Investing is a powerful local approach to putting your money to work in the service of your values. By providing hardworking individuals and organizations with the financing they need to help themselves, Community Investing offers solutions to many twenty-first century challenges, from inner-city decay to the decline of the rain forests.
Anyone who remembers banker George Bailey's service to his own hometown in the movie It's a Wonderful Life realizes that community banking is hardly a new idea. It boils down to investing money in the people who are making the community a better place to live.
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Read more: Community Investing
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As individuals and as a company, we at Natural Investments have consistently found ourselves at the leading edges of creating the change we want to see in the world. In our communities, we tend to work with innovative collaborators whose experiments in architecture, agriculture, and community planning are often ahead of the curve.
So it's no surprise that we also find ourselves looking beyond the readily-available investment vehicles as we work to push our economic system toward more constructive expressions. As great as it can be to invest in an alternative-energy mutual fund, or support a community development loan fund with a low-interest loan, we want to do more. We call this relatively uncharted realm "Regenerative Investing".
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Read more: Regenerative Investing
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Giving Back
We donate 1% of our sales to environmental organizations, including:
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The Heart Rating
How do you measure if an investment is socially responsible? Consult our Heart Rating.
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