Effective management of  environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues  is a central component to charitable investment requirements. A charity’s investments should support the organisation’s mission, rather than conflict with them. Evelyn Partners works with charities to understand their ESG objectives first, and then build a portfolio around these.

Finding the right balance between maximising the probability of achieving your target, your financial goal or ensuring your investments genuinely align with your values and purposes can be a challenge. Our approach allows each charity to reflect their unique characteristics

This begins with our robust central investment process which uses quantitative and qualitative factors to create a foundation and structure that manages risk at every level. This provides our clients with the peace of mind that their portfolios are capturing long term trends, while managing short and medium term risks. Embedding ESG screening factors into this process ensures we are also protecting your charity from any additional reputational risks.

Furthermore, we prioritise good stewardship and engagement. We can report on a wide range of carbon emission metrics and ESG scoring for each charity portfolio. This also enables us to measure progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Charity Trustees should manage their investments to maximise their returns in respect of their risk tolerance and their mission. Our investment managers work together with trustees to review the holdings in their portfolio regularly to ensure best fit. Actively engaging with businesses on each charity’s behalf, allows us to ascertain a company’s  direction of travel   towards improving their ESG scores instead of immediately screening them out. This prevents any unnecessary, and potentially costly, restrictions on a charity’s portfolio while ensuring full alignment with its mission. Additionally, considering ESG criteria when investing provides trustees with an further layer of due diligence which can make portfolios more resilient during market downturns.

We collaboratively engage through our membership of Investor Forum, Climate Action 100+ and Find it, Fix it, Prevent it, which engages on modern day slavery.