Our Faith Calls Us To Align Our Investments With Our Values

Last month I addressed the first advisory committee meeting for the Jubilee Assembly, Calvert Foundation’s community of faith-based investors. Led by Director of Faith-based Investing Jeffrey Dekro, the committee brought together leaders from all backgrounds and beliefs. Together we agreed that now, more than ever, our faiths are calling on us to step up and live out the values we so strongly adhere to.

As 2016 came to a close, many of us felt that there was a lot of space for us to take on more proactive, supporting, and positive roles for 2017. In particular, I think all of our faiths ask us to:

• Create sanctuary for human beings
• Resist, in all manners possible, the degradation of people based on their race, gender, orientation or religion

And tell us that:

• It will fall to faith communities to partner with environmental protectors;
• It will fall to investors to take stock- again, with new eyes – all the ways that we are in accordance with our faiths’ responses, all the ways we are not in accordance, and all the ways to deepen our faith ties.

Luckily, there is no need for investors to build an antidote to the wall, or the registry, or the massive defundings that we fear, because these structures already exist for us.

Calvert Foundation is, without a doubt, one outlet for faith-based individuals and communities to live out their values through investing. The Community Investment Note provides an avenue to channel money in a sustainable and impactful way towards non-profits and social enterprises that are living out the work we seek to support.

As the Jubilee Assembly moves forward into 2017, one of our goals is to find the commonalities among faith-based investors, so that we can shine a mirror to the impact investing world and ask whether the solutions that are being proposed are suitable for the problems. I invite all those interested to share with us your goals as we work together to imagine how they can be accomplished.

Through the Jubilee Assembly we aim to accomplish the following, which the collegium of the United Church of Christ recently outlined as a way to respond to the new day:

We will listen well. We will speak clearly. We will not be separated by Love.

To find out more about the Jubilee Assembly and sign up to join, visit: calvertfoundation.org/faith

Katie McCloskey is the Chairwoman of the Jubilee Assembly at Calvert Foundation, Director of Social Responsibility at United Church Funds, and on the Board of Directors at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. Read more here.