Notable Enhancements to the UU Common Endowment Fund
We’ve made a few notable enhancements to the UU Common Endowment Fund (UUCEF) since September, making decisions through the lens of UU values – with each of these, we are living up to our commitments to invest in underserved communities, address both health and economic inequality, and promote environmental justice, while seeking risk adjusted financial returns for our investing congregations.
Untapped Capital Consulting was hired to help enhance our investment process and decision making for the growing Community Investments portfolio. Untapped is a fantastic shop lead by Eric Horvath working with institutions and families on mission-based community investing. Later we’ll look to add CapShift to enhance Community Investment sourcing, monitoring and impact reporting. CapShift has been very successful working with DAFs (donor advised funds) on community and impact investing, applying technology to make this style of investing easier and more cost effective, and we’re happy to be part of their growth with institutional faith and values investors.
After an extensive search, we hired Axiom Investors for a US small company growth equity mandate aligned with our UU values investment guidelines. Axiom is a top-rated ESG manager with an excellent track record and very competitive fees. They will start their work with the UUCEF this month. And in the private investment space, we recently signed on with two new funds:
- Avance Investment Management, Fund II. Avance is a Latino-owned, buyout strategy, focused on investing in, and growing Latino/a-owned businesses.
- obvious.com, Fund V. Obvious Ventures is an early-stage venture capital strategy with a focus on new ventures within three pillars of investment; planetary health, human health, and economic health. Obvious also has strong impact reporting, and mapping portfolio companies to UN SDGs to help tell the stories of real world investment impact.
We are looking forward to working with our new advisors and managers to not only be good stewards for the future of the CEF, investing congregations and the UUA , but also to help meet our UU mission-focused priorities.