Values-Aligned Investing
Understanding what matters most to you is the start of our work together. Your values, priorities, and vision for the future guide the design of your customized investment portfolio.
What is values-aligned investing?
Values-aligned investing begins with your advisor seeking to deeply understand your specific core values and social and environmental priorities in order to help express them within an investable portfolio.
To translate values into action, Veris draws on several key approaches including:
- Sustainable investing
- Shareholder advocacy and engagement — using voices and votes to encourage corporate change
- Thematic impact investing
- Investments in private impact funds
- Community investment notes
For institutional clients like foundations and endowments, Veris often applies this values-aligned approach through Mission-Related Investing (MRI), deliberately aligning financial assets with the organization’s mission outcomes to amplify the impact of its programmatic work while seeking to pursue targeted financial returns.
Activating Your Values
Impact investors can use specific levers within asset classes to help drive progress on the issues that matter to them. Here is how impact can happen across a values-aligned portfolio.
Saving at values-aligned community banks, credit unions, or CDFIs turns deposits into loans that can help build wealth and spur sustainable development in under-resourced communities historically shut out of equitable access to capital.
Use of proceeds determines what your capital will build. Investors apply inclusionary and exclusionary screening to bond selection and can use bondholder engagement to encourage transparency and the changes they want to see from issuers.
Ownership is a seat at the table. Through shareholder engagement and advocacy, proxy voting, screening, and thematic strategies focused on specific challenges, investors can press public companies for positive change.
In private equity, private debt, and venture capital, impact takes shape through who you invest in, what a company does, and how it operates — supporting founders and business models with the potential to help solve priority challenges.
Thematic Investing
Recognizing the interconnectedness of social and environmental challenges, we take an intersectional approach to thematic investing. Our four primary impact themes are
- Climate Solutions & the Environment
- Racial & Gender Equity
- Community Wealth Building
- and Sustainable & Regenerative Agriculture.
We selected these themes because we believe they represent the areas where a majority of our clients want to advance their values through their portfolios and because dedicating focused research to specific categories sharpens our understanding of impactful solutions. These focus areas give us a concrete way to translate your social and environmental imperatives, or your foundation’s theory of change, into a well-diversified, investable portfolio. In practice, we tailor this work to your specific values or mission.
Learn more about the themes that anchor our impact research and how we analyze the ways they intersect and reinforce one another.
Active Ownership
Shareholder advocacy and public policy initiatives designed to amplify clients’ voices in public markets in a variety of ways.
Supporters & Filers
Through advocacy partners including As You Sow, The Shareholder Commons, Open MIC, and Rhia Ventures, clients can support or file shareholder resolutions on critical issues, from climate risk to racial justice audits.
Vote Your Values
We seek managers who vote proxies in line with clear guidelines and provide reporting that tracks not just how votes were cast, but engagement outcomes, — such as resolutions withdrawn after company commitments.
Shape Public Policy
As a member of US SIF, Veris offers clients opportunities to participate in public policy initiatives, including SEC comment letters and industry education on Capitol Hill.
Voices and Votes
We believe shareholders have a powerful opportunity to advocate for change at the publicly listed companies they are invested in, as equity holders and, increasingly, as bondholders. A key tenet of our investment philosophy is that active ownership, rather than exclusionary screening alone, can help drive changes that lead to positive environmental and social outcomes.
Guided by client direction, Veris offers clients the opportunity to directly participate in shareholder resolutions by acting as sponsors or filers alongside established advocacy groups. Emphasizing a collaborative approach to shareholder advocacy, we also aim to facilitate connections between these advocacy groups and our approved managers, focusing specifically on the issues our clients are most passionate about.
Measuring What Matters
Veris has developed a rigorous Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) framework designed to systematically evaluate, monitor, and report on the social and environmental outcomes of client investments across asset classes. Impact analysis, examining Product, People, Philosophy, Process, Performance, and Impact, is integrated into the Veris Due Diligence Process alongside traditional investment criteria.
Our analysis of a fund manager’s impact measurement and management approach includes both qualitative and quantitative review. To support transparency and accountability, we draw on standards established by organizations such as the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and its IRIS+ system, and the five dimensions of impact developed by the Impact Management Project.
Learn how the Veris Due Diligence Process evaluates managers across public and private markets and how impact analysis is built into that process from the start.