Impact Investing Influencers: Mark Regier

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

Mark Regier, VP of Stewardship Investing, Praxis Mutual Funds

Equities.com: Tell us a little about yourself and your work.

Mark Regier: I am vice president of stewardship investing for Praxis mutual funds. We’re part of Everence Financial, which is a diversified faith-based financial services organization. We are celebrating our 30th anniversary at Praxis.

EQ: Stewardship investing is a term that most people aren’t familiar with. Can you describe it?

MR: We decided to use stewardship investing to help describe where our values were coming from. It’s about the idea of what does it means to be a holistic, Christian steward. We wanted to take that concept into the investment arena and say, how does that affect what we’re doing? And we thought it was important to not just be ‘socially responsible,’ which is what was available at the time. When we started, things like impact and ESG hadn’t yet sort of emerged, and so this was our way of building in the faith values that we held most dear.

When we look at the phrase ‘socially responsible investing,’ if we were to pick which of those words was most important to us, it would probably be responsible. I think a lot of the SRI industry the goal was social: We’re saving the planet. We’re saving the trees, the whales. You know, we’re achieving something. And for Praxis, it’s really been about stewardship. If you’re asked to be a steward of something, you’ve got to manage it, which means you’ve got to bring all these forces together. We’ve always been rooted in the fact that our responsibility to the world grows out of our responsibility to our clients — and to God. So that’s why stewardship investing is right for us.

EQ: What are you looking forward to most at the USSIF Forum?

MR: US SUF has just completed, obviously, a very important leadership transition from Lisa Woll, who had guided us for 17 years to now Maria Lettini, who has joined us. I’m excited about how Maria and her staff are looking at the world again in some new ways. I’ve been impressed with their openness to building bridges to new sectors of the market in terms of perspectives on the world. So we’re not just talking to the converted, but that we’re talking to folks who may think a little differently than we do, but may share some of our values. I’m anxious to work with them on bridging some of those divides, and seeing what we can do to support such efforts. There are a number of progressive faith-based groups that are no longer members of US SIF, and I’m anxious to see what we might be able to do to bring them back into the organization.

I think we need to solidify the shared understanding of the value that environmental, social and governance data has, and that it needs to be used authentically and realistically.  This isn’t about agendas, it’s about data. I think we need to say, we can be boring. Boring is good when it’s the right stuff, right?

EQ: What’s something that you’re focused on in the next year?

MR: I’m hoping that soon we’ll be at a place in this country where we can focus on being the neighbors that I think we really are in so many ways. It’s funny, because our Anabaptist faith tradition is very committed to disaster recovery work. And it always surprises me, as I’ve visited some of these sites over the years, that people really are just people.

And if you take some of this crazy noise away, we can generally relate to each other in a very real, personal way. If you’re helping somebody muck out a house, you don’t ask whether they’re red or blue or whatever, you just grab a broom or shovel and you do it. Right? So that’s my hope — that we remember this truth. That’s my best hope for the year ahead.

Check out all the Impact Investing Influencers.