Here’s the truth: All investments have an impact. And when you don’t keep tabs on what assets you own, you risk using your financial power to support causes that conflict with your own values. Your capital might be used to support companies that pollute the planet, profit from war, or hold women and/or people of color back. That means you’re advancing financially because those companies are advancing. No thank you.

But when you’re intentional about your investments, you get to call the shots on what causes your own money is advancing; you purposefully invest for a positive impact — and for competitive returns. Impact investing is an incredibly fast-growing sector for that reason. Investors have realized that they can align their portfolios with their values, while holding industry leaders accountable, while capitalizing on a better financial performance that research has shown comes with companies with good business practices. In other words, impact investing can be a good financial choice as well as a moral one.

Today, Ellevest Private Wealth Management clients can actively direct their money into positive impact investments across their entire portfolio in all three major asset classes: equities, fixed income, and private alternatives. Here’s a guide to how we make that all possible:

1. Intentional investing with equities

The Ellevest Intentional Impact Equity Strategy & portfolios

For clients who want to: invest more meaningfully in the causes they care about (and divest from causes they don’t).

How Ellevest makes it possible: A typical Ellevest Intentional Impact portfolio is made up of investments in roughly 300 companies, each of which is individually evaluated according to strict environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. That evaluation is based on an abundance of data thanks to our partners at Ethic, which allows us to continually re-evaluate, move quickly, and seek to ensure the information we’re relying on is as unbiased as possible. If a company falls short in any of these criteria — identified by 13 focus areas, from Workplace Diversity to Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Labor Relations — we exclude it from the portfolios.

Read more about the Ellevest Intentional Impact portfolios here.

The Ellevest Climate-Conscious Impact Equity Strategy & portfolios

For clients who want to: invest more meaningfully with a greater climate-specific approach.

How Ellevest makes it possible: A typical Ellevest Climate-Conscious Impact portfolio is made up of investments with companies that pass a set of criteria geared toward environmental sustainability. Those criteria fall under five main pillars — clean water, climate change (aka carbon footprint), sustainable agriculture, pollution, and deforestation — which then divide into 13 even more specific subcategories. Like the pillars we use to build the Ellevest Intentional Impact portfolios, these are also backed up by a wealth of data thanks to our partners at Ethic.

Read more about the Ellevest Climate-Conscious Impact Equity Strategy here.

The Ellevest custom equity portfolios

For clients who want to: invest more meaningfully with specific impact goals in mind.

How Ellevest makes it possible: We can also design a customized strategy to align with your values. To do that, we start by building out a personal mission statement and evaluating how public companies’ behaviors align with your impact objectives. For example, your portfolio could invest in companies committed to racial justice, prison reform, and gun control.

Reach out to us about the Ellevest custom equity portfolios here.

2. Intentional investing with fixed income

The Ellevest Municipal Impact Strategy, managed by AllianceBernstein®

For clients who want to: invest in municipal bonds that fund projects geared toward environmental and social impact, to help make local economies more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable.

How Ellevest makes it possible: We take the daunting work out of choosing bonds for impact (the muni market currently stands at roughly $4.1 trillion, with more than a million outstanding individual bonds, most of which aren’t always slated to fund projects geared toward environmental and social impact) by selecting each municipal bond for your portfolio based on its ability to create a specific, measurable environmental and/or social impact in at least one of six key focus areas: primary and secondary education, health care, electric utility, water and sewer, mass transportation, and economic community development. This strategy allows clients to invest in municipal bonds that seek to offer both portfolio stability and tax-advantaged income while seeking to deliver environmental and social impact in historically marginalized communities, with the specific goal of reducing existing gaps in areas like academic achievement, economic development, and health care.

Read more about the Ellevest Municipal Impact Strategy, managed by AllianceBernstein®, here.

3. Intentional investing with private alternatives

The Ellevest private alternatives

For clients who want to: use private capital to address some of the world’s largest societal and environmental issues with long-term nontraditional assets that also have the potential to achieve financial returns.

How Ellevest makes it possible: We customize the allocation of your alternatives based on the specific issues you care about in order to seek to reduce overall portfolio risk, enhance returns, generate income, and create positive social and/or environmental change at the same time. In some cases, we’ve even found alternative investments where the goal is to close more than one social or environmental gap — for instance, investing in alternatives in sustainable agriculture may be doing good for both the climate and local communities — creating the potential for a triple bottom line.

Read more about impact alternatives in this whitepaper written by Ellevest Chief Investment Officer Dr. Sylvia Kwan.

Why invest for impact with Ellevest?

• A returns-first approach. We design portfolios to help advance underserved communities and important causes without sacrificing your financial goals.
• A women-first approach. We invest in women and the causes that prioritize and advance them — after all, we’re a “by women, for women” financial firm.
• A highly personalized approach. We work with each client one-on-one to understand their financial and impact-investing goals and create a custom investment strategy designed to hit both.
• A proactive approach. We don’t wait for competitors or the market to produce the opportunities we want for our clients. We push others in the industry to change, and use our visibility, influence, resourcefulness, and investment experience to innovate and collaborate with other mission-aligned firms to bring new impact investing solutions to people and institutions — seeking to ensure these solutions meet our high standards as we go.

Investing intentionally for both impact and returns is well within reach. If you would like to learn more about Ellevest Wealth Management, how we help our clients build their wealth, and our values-aligned investment strategy, you can schedule a call with us here.