The majority of our endowment (approximately $50 million) is invested in the Transition portfolio with the primary goals of preserving capital and earning a sufficient financial return to continue our grantmaking in relative perpetuity. The Transition portfolio is governed by our No Buy Guidelines, even though these investments are not entirely in alignment with our mission and values. The bulk of the money is in traditional Wall Street investments invested across all asset classes. That said, we have also made early investments in Microvest, Guayaki, Community Capital Management and Impax New Energy Investors. Originally housed in our Aligned Portfolio, these investments have transitioned to our Transition Portfolio where their financial performance and risk profile is on par with their asset class. In this way, we are slowly shifting the Transition portfolio toward closer alignment.

Our formal investment policy for the Transition Portfolio includes setting a long term horizon of 10 years, limiting risk through diversification amongst a wide range of investments and achieving a 100 percent values-aligned investment portfolio. Our vision is that one day our Transition portfolio will be composed entirely of mission-aligned investments that actively work in concert with our grantmaking efforts. We recognize that larger, systemic changes to the economy must occur before this can happen. We believe that our efforts to identify and support socially and environmentally responsible innovative investments will advance this goal.

A note about PRI’s: While Program Related Investments can supplement grants and program costs in meeting the five percent, we do not make PRI’s from our grants budget. Even though a growing segment of our Aligned and Transition assets meet the IRS qualifications for PRIs, we only classify some investments as PRIs and again, do not count them as part of our grants payout.