Capstone Project – Brighter Investing Team (Spring 2022)
For my capstone project, my team and I worked with a Public Benefit Registered Financial Adviser in Atlanta called Brighter Investing. Brighter Investing specializes in Sustainable Investing, ESG Investing, and Impact Investing. These three investing practices are an extension of socially responsible investing, that has grown in popularity and demand over time and serves as an excellent tool to help achieve sustainability. ESG Investing stands for environmental, social, and governance. These are three non-financial categories to measure an investment’s sustainability and financial risk associated with ESG criteria.
Our project partner was Gary Whitehurst, the co-founder of Brighter Investing. Gary has over 25 years of experience in the finance industry and served as an excellent partner and mentor throughout our project. Gary tasked my team and me to research specific thematic areas of investments including gender diversity, social justice, and clean energy bonds. He wanted each of us to first define our theme and research what is being accomplished outside of the investment world to solve these issues. With that knowledge, we each then dove deeper into our research to find out how sustainable and impact investments can support our specific theme and what related investment opportunities are currently available on the market. In the end, each of my team members recommended two investment solutions for Brighter Investing’s portfolio, totaling six investment recommendations.
My focus for this assignment was on the gender diversity theme. Gender diversity is defined as the fair and equitable representation of people of different genders. Through this project, I was introduced to the concept of Gender Lens Investing. Gender Lens Investing is a “strategy or approach to investing that takes into consideration gender-based factors across the investment process to advance gender equality and better inform investment decisions”. Examples of this include investing in women-owned or women-led enterprises, investing in enterprises that promote workplace equity, or investing in enterprises that offer products or services that substantially improve the lives of women and girls.
This project was encompassing of all three spheres of sustainability; social, environmental, and economic. Firstly, the gender equity theme fits into the social sphere as it relates to equal opportunity and representation. This theme also relates to the economic sphere as it encompasses business ethics and workers’ rights. The social justice theme is an obvious fit for the social sphere however it also overlaps with the environmental sphere when it is related to environmental justice. Lastly, the clean energy bond theme fits into both the environmental and economic spheres. Clean energy bonds allow for affordable opportunities to finance renewable energy projects. Through these three themes, I learned that Sustainable Investing is a broad concept that balances traditional investing practices with sustainable related insights to improve long-term outcomes.
This project provided me with the opportunity to relate my studies in finance to my passion for sustainability. I gained a deeper insight into sustainable investing and how firms measure their sustainable impact. The greatest takeaway from my research was that many investments and companies do not have explicit information disclosing their sustainable practices and overall impacts. I learned how important it is to evaluate how an investment or company measures and reports its impact. Without standardized reporting metrics in the world of sustainable investing, an investor must take a deeper look at an investment’s actual engagement on its sustainable impact. When building a responsible portfolio, an investor wants to ensure they are selecting investments that are truly aligned with their values and that they are not conveying false impressions or misleading information about their sustainable practices.
Below I included two of my team’s final deliverables, our final presentation to our class and our investment recommendation presentation to Gary Whitehurst. If you are interested in getting started in sustainable investing, take a look at our recommendations! Sustainable and ESG investing is a strong and valuable tool in contributing to sustainability and can drive measurable positive change.