Our strong belief in mission based investing for charitable foundations has led us to create a trust structure that allows Canadian foundations to invest. Historically Canadian foundations have been restricted from limited partnership investments. U.S. based foundations can also participate through the U.S. partnership.
Renewal2 has 16 foundation investors as of May 2010.
Resources
The More for Mission Campaign is a proactive commitment to broadly promote mission investing and challenge foundations to take up mission investing practices. The campaign which was originally founded by the Meyer Memorial Trust, Annie E. Casey Foundation and F.B. Heron Foundation now has a Leadership Committee of 33 foundations who are collectively responsible for $25 billion of assets. This site has an excellent resource section.
The F.B. Heron Foundation is a $300M private, grant making institution dedicated to supporting organizations with a track record of building wealth within low-income communities. The Foundation invests approximately 24% of its assets in mission-based investments and has been a leader in MBI globally. The MBI section of their site has excellent information on how they have implemented their MBI strategy and many industry research reports on the broader movement.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors helps donors create effective philanthropy throughout the world, originally developed as the private philanthropy service of the Rockefeller family; they are now an independent, non-profit service. As part of their mission to help donors they create publications on key trends and new ideas in philanthropy which can be found under Ideas & Perspectives/Publications. The two of most relevance to MBI are “Philanthropy’s New Passing Gear: Mission Related Investing, A Policy and Implementation Guide for Foundation Trustees” and “MRI in an Age of Scarcity.”
