What attracted you to apply to the Endowments Investing Challenge?
Endowments have an opportunity – perhaps even a responsibility – to ensure their capital actively supports their mission. What excites us about the Endowments Investing Challenge is its collectively held vision: a group of endowments coming together to build a movement for a more transparent, values driven investment system with future generations firmly in mind.
Foresight’s WHEB strategies are built for this ambition. Our approach is 100% focused on companies delivering solutions to critical environmental and social challenges, grounded in a long track record of championing impact investing for long term, intergenerational benefit. This makes the strategies a natural fit with the Challenge’s goals and its wider effort to reshape the investment system for people and planet.
Tell us the changes you're most proud of in your organisation that move you towards being more sustainable, inclusive and responsible for a better future for all.
Foresight’s WHEB strategies have always been wholly focused on advancing sustainability through positive impact investing. All our innovation and investment has been in support of this proposition. We were the first to develop an impact calculator connecting individuals with the impacts associated with their investments. We were the first to produce a stand-alone impact report and the first listed equity fund to secure a Sustainability Impact label under SDR. As a small team we are extremely proud to have blazed this trail. But most of all we are proud to have shown that it is possible to be a successful business that really cares about sustainability and wants to help build a better world for future generations.
What opportunities do you see to invest in impact on future generations?
Foresight’s WHEB strategies target investments in listed companies because we believe their scale is a critical lever in delivering change. Solving major global challenges like climate change and disease, needs the scale that matches those challenges. We invest in companies selling products and services that solve critical social and environmental challenges.
Fundamentally, as impact investors we want these companies to sell more of their products and services. This increases the positive impact they deliver, but it also increases their revenues. There is complete alignment between the ‘impact case’ and the ‘investment case’. It’s these types of companies that offer the biggest opportunity to have a positive impact on future generations.
What have you learnt through this process?
We have learnt that there are asset owners that still want to be brave, and that want to innovate and learn alongside asset managers in building a movement within financial markets that is focused on creating a more sustainable economic system that serves current and future generations.
What question would you like to ask the Future Generations Panel?
We would like to ask the Future Generations Panel: What do you believe are the most important things that profit-making businesses and wider financial markets can do to help to solve critical social and environmental challenges?
Response from the Future Generations Panel:
Firstly, more players in the financial markets should be investing in social impact organisations and projects that address issues such as access to education, healthcare, equality, and environmental sustainability. We need renewable energy, affordable homes, accessible healthcare, good jobs, equal pay, and places for communities to gather. Investments can help make that happen.
Secondly, profit-making organisations have a role to play here. They should really look at the stakeholders they make profit for. They should consider how they can redistribute the profit and collaborate with others to use it to tackle the social and environmental challenges we face. We’re interested in how cooperative ways of working and B Corps could support this. We’d like to see companies moving to shared ownership, distributing surplus profit among employees, producers or for community benefit, and really harnessing business for good.
Businesses also impact the health and wellbeing of their employees and should consider what organisational changes would support their employees and make them a great place to work.
Overall, both profit-making companies and financial markets are a huge part of our economic system. Change is needed, and they must put themselves forward and play a part in how we make a sustainable and fairer future.