Impact Investing Influencers: Justin Conway

US SIF — the Sustainable Investment Forum is a leading voice advancing sustainable investing across all asset classes. The forum says its mission is to rapidly shift investment practices toward sustainability, focusing on long-term investment and the generation of positive social and environmental impacts.

Its members represent $5 trillion in assets under management or advisement and include investment management and advisory firms, mutual fund companies, ​asset owners, data and research firms, financial planners and advisors, broker-dealers, banks, credit unions, community development financial institutions and nonprofit associations.

Equities News caught up with influential members of US SIF at the organization’s recent Forum 2024 in Chicago.

Justin Conway , VP, Investment Partnerships, Calvert Impact

Tell us a little about yourself and what you’re working on.

Calvert Impact is a nonprofit investment firm trying to help people invest for social and climate justice, and so we’re really excited to get more asset managers and advisors, and of course, their investors, understanding what the real impact opportunities are. We do a lot on the education front, and we are building out our product platform to help connect investors to the issues and the places that they care about, and where we can see real, measurable social and environmental impact.

We have a few new products out in the market in the last six months. One is the Cut Carbon Note, which is focused on decarbonizing buildings through investing in energy efficiency and renewable upgrades in those facilities. Buildings are where 40% of our carbon emissions come from, and so we have to address it in order to meet our clean energy transition goals. We talked about that with Equities.com earlier this year.

We also have the Mission Driven Bank Fund, which is a private equity fund focused on addressing the racial wealth gap, that will be in the market for new investors for the next year. And we have some new products in the pipeline, but the big thing for us in the next six to 12 months is growing these existing opportunities, and figuring out how we bring more investors into financing them.? It’s not all doom and gloom out there, as we know, there’s a lot of good things happening in the climate space and in the social justice space too, that we can start investing in more.

Are you talking directly to these investors, or are you talking to them through intermediaries like advisors?

We do work directly with individual investors, over 97% of our investor base, by number, is individuals, but the majority of the dollars still come from institutions. Smaller community and family foundations, nonprofits, faith based institutions, a lot of mutual funds. So we mostly work with financial advisors and help them understand how impact investing is great relationship builder, a great business differentiator in a lot of ways, and how they can integrate not just us but other impact investing options into their portfolios, both for the returns, but also for the better stories and engagement that you can have with clients around the real, tangible impact that impact investments have.

What are you most excited about here at the 2024 US SIF Forum?

This quarter we announced that we won part of the award to manage the National Clean Investment Fund. So everyone has a lot of questions about how we’re going to manage that $7 billion and what that will mean for the industry. And we’re excited to talk about this program that, while it won’t mean new investable products immediately, it ultimately will need to bring in private capital on every single deal. So this is going to lead to municipal bonds, asset backed securities, and other products that we ultimately want to see become accessible to advisers and investors.

Check out all the Impact Investing Influencers.