Speaking at the Responsible InvestorESG USA 2012 conference in New York City, IRI Visiting Fellow Jay Youngdahl briefly chats about how legal culture slows the incorporation and adoption of ESG into pension fund investments. “To truly provide a proper fiduciary duty to one’s beneficiaries, one must look for financial returns to be sure, but they must do it in a way that is sustainable, that is holistic, and that helps the beneficiaries as much as possible…it is really a question of whether the lawyers representing the funds have the courage to do what their trustees want to do in terms of seeing fiduciary duty as a way to do the best job overall for the beneficiaries.”
The IRI will be exploring this topic more in depth at its upcoming Trustee Leadership Forum for Retirement Security meeting on May 30-31. Stay tuned for more information on this project!
More for Mission and the PRI Makers Network are pleased to announce that they have become one organization: Mission Investors Exchange. The new integrated organization is the mission investing community where philanthropic innovators exchange ideas, tools, and experiences to increase the impact of their capital. It will provide resources and education about both program-related investments and mission-related investments, looking at the entire spectrum of foundation investments.
The IRI, as a strategic partner of the Mission Investors Exchange, will continue research on the field of mission investing, focusing through 2012 in particular on the role of philanthropic capital in mobilizing private capital markets and the impact of foundation culture on mission investing decision-making.
Follow the Mission Investors Exchange on Twitter @missioninvest, and visit the website for conversation, events, tools and resources.
A winning paper on fiduciary duty by IRI Founding Director and Senior Fellow Steve Lydenberg was mentioned prominently in a recent article by Stephen Davis and Jon Lukomnik in Compliance Week (read here, login required). The article discusses in detail the close relationship between fiduciary duty interpretations and corporate governance, arguing that a change towards increased engagement by investors in conjunction with a more long-term approach to investment could strengthen long-term corporate performance.
Have thoughts about Steve’s paper or Stephen and Jon’s hypothesis? Let us know.
