Women of Impact: Kristin Hull and Nia Impact move mountains (Part I)

Inspired by Women’s History Month, we’re launching an ongoing interview series with top women in the worlds of finance & investment, clean technology, environment and society. These are virtual fireside chats with some of the most experienced and knowledgeable women in their industries. We’re thrilled to kick off this series with a two-part conversation with Kristin Hull, founder and CEO of Nia Impact Capital. 

In Part I, we learn about Kristin’s background, which blends the worlds of finance and education, get introduced to Nia Impact Capital, and ask Kristin about the wins she is most proud of. (Read to the end, because those wins are pretty big.)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Birgitte Rasine: Kristin, pleasure to have you with us for this inaugural story for Women of Impact. Tell us about the impact investment firm you run, Nia Impact Capital. 

Kristin Hull: Nia is the Swahili word for intention and purpose. Our work is about harnessing financial markets for social justice as well as for environmental gains. And so that’s really where the term Nia comes in: it means purpose. Bringing that sense of intention and purpose, both to every company that we invest into and to building our own firm to follow best practices in human capital management, training young people in sustainable finance.

We build high impact public equities portfolios with intention and purpose. We design concentrated portfolios, investing at the intersection of environmental sustainability and social justice. We look across our six solution themes for companies that are going to benefit from, and help us in, the transition to a just and sustainable economy: which companies are going to play a part, which ones are poised to help in the transition and which ones are doing the very best human capital management. Currently we have $475M under management.

 So that’s the product side. We have a Changing the Face of Finance internship program, which is a core component of what we do, and that’s training. It’s really making a space for young and potential changemakers to come in and learn how to do sustainable finance because there are just so few shops, firms, asset managers doing sustainable and social justice investing in an authentic way. There’s a lot of greenwashing out there and not very many people who know how to do it in a way that can actually change systems.

The other piece [of our work]—that we don’t get any revenues from, although we’re well known for it—is engaging with every company that we invest in, as part of our due diligence process. Getting to know the people behind the ticker symbol and working to make change. We know that change happens one conversation at a time and we have those conversations with as many companies as we can.

BR: How would you describe the kinds of people attracted to Nia and its model?

KH: Our clients are our investors; we work to empower them to feel that they can invest in a really competent way. Nia attracts forward thinking investors: those who care about the environment, and those who understand we are in a transition to the next, just and sustainable economy and who want their assets aligned with and benefiting from that transition.

We also tend to attract those investors who are interested in the benefits of diversity in leadership, and companies that include women in senior management.

BR: How did you originally become interested in finance? What motivated you to focus specifically on responsible or impact finance?

KH: I grew up in a trading firm. My dad started a trading firm in a garage—as one does in California—and so we were talking puts and calls and pork bellies, and commodities, futures, options, derivatives. So that’s what I was hearing since I was about 14—and not necessarily loving that [laughs]. It was a family company, and it was a requirement to work there and it was a way to connect with my dad. Later we moved to Chicago—it was summers on the trading floor and the mantra at the dinner table and the backseat of the station wagon was always, buy low and sell high, as often as one possibly can, which is what you do in a high-frequency trading firm.

I would ask questions like, what kind of good are we doing, what are we doing by being the market maker. There were times where being that middleman seemed to make sense and yet it was always very transactional. When we sold that company to Goldman Sachs, that’s when we really got to take a step back and see what was next.

By then I had started a career in education. I had started a charter school in Oakland and I was helping with the fundraising for the charter school, working with the city, with the banks and foundations to get loan guarantees. As the capital campaign came together I realized that the people in my community—the teachers and the parents—had few financial skills or aptitude. I had to do something about that. So creating products that were transparent, focused on the solutions,  and meant something and were tangible to the people in my community, that’s what motivated me to create Nia.

BR: What an inspiring story—especially love hearing about your commitment to education. I imagine you put just as much thought into supporting your team. We know it’s not easy being a woman leader in the investment space.

KH: It’s definitely not easy to be a woman in finance, and to be an asset manager, where women-led firms make up just 0.7% (yes, less than 1%) of the $80T under management. Every day can bring challenges, and yet at Nia, we have built an incredibly strong and talented team. We’re thoughtful. Thoughtful and intentional. We recognize we are humans in this space—and we’re also women in this space. We’re in financial asset management, the belly of the beast, which has been white male dominated, you know, since inception. So, we aren’t just trying to build a status quo company, we want to build a company that honors individuals. Just like we don’t want to invest in companies in a transactional way, we don’t want our company set up that way either.

BR: You’ve worked on issues ranging from renewable energy to gender equality to social justice, and you’ve been able to move a few mountains in the seven short years Nia has been around. What have been your greatest gains in terms of moving the needle on large corporations?

KH: There are some big standouts. We won a shareholder resolution at IBM for enhanced diversity reporting which was really important to us because of their size and the role IBM plays in the global economy. We won with 94% of that vote, which is pretty unheard of for a shareholder resolution. The company actually ended up supporting our resolution, which then garnered more support.

Particularly with AI, the algorithms that are going to rule our world, we need to make sure that there are diverse people at those [corporate] tables. They now have a chief diversity officer and she has, I believe, 50 people reporting to her, so it’s not just a checkbox—they actually have a program and are really rolling this out. And we can check in with them on their progress. That was a pretty big win.

BR: The IBM case study is well worth a read—it makes you appreciate just how much work—and conviction—went into persuading a large corporate entity to work with you rather than against you. You were also able to make a shift at one of the world’s largest and best known companies.

KH: Yes—another win announced last year was Apple. Because of our collective work, Apple removed concealment clauses from all of their employee contracts. We got everything we wanted: US employees, international employees, and all contract workers. That was a big deal.

BR: That is a big deal—and just for our readers’ information, a concealment clause in an employment contract limits a worker’s ability to talk about any unlawful activities at work, such as harassment and discrimination. In other words, if a woman—or any person—can’t speak up about harassment or discrimination on the job, they are effectively silenced and put into a vulnerable position. Kristin, having achieved these significant shifts, what are you most proud of?

KH: I think the thing I’m proud of personally, is just our perseverance. That we’re still here and we’re still doing this. I ran into someone I knew from our co-working space over 10 years ago—she had moved away to Vermont and happened to be in town that weekend. She said, “You’ve inspired me in so many ways. I’ve watched you grow Nia from nothing to this.” I think showing other women that change is possible, that means a lot.

Join us next week for Part II, where we talk about some of the challenges in the work Kristin’s team is doing, both in the male-dominated venture world and the larger sphere of corporate influence, and how far we still have to go.

Read about another woman powerhouse, this time in the professional football arena (yes, really!)