Bryan Stevenson, the public interest lawyer who heads the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., got a standing ovation at this week’s US-SIF conference.
“Linking social justice and finance felt like a very important intersection achieved here,” Enclude’s Jan Piercy reports from Chicago.
Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy, told the crowd of social investors, “We cannot make progress without changing the narrative.”
To help do so, Pat Miguel Tomaino of Zevin Asset Management, a Boston-based investment advisor managing about $500 million in assets, has laid out a racial-lens investing manifesto.
Zevin screens out companies that exploit minority and economically-disadvantaged communities, by profiting from mass incarceration, for example.
Last year, Zevin pressed Starbucks and Target Corporation to disclose or develop so-called Fair Chance Hiring policies.
McKinsey says firms with racial diversity have better than average returns. Dalberg has found tech firms could boost revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars with workforces that fully reflect the talent pool.
