SOCiALLY rESPONSiBLE
by Brigit Ingram
InvestInG
Reflects Our Values
S
ome investors prefer to put their money to work in a
way more closely aligned with their personal values
and social practices. Others are more interested in so-
cial change. They all seek to catalyze the shift toward a more
economically just and environmentally sustainable world.
According to Rachel MacKnight, a spokesperson for the
Social Investment Forum (SIF), shareholder activists, who
align their personal and social values with their investment
decisions, like knowing that their $2.71 trillion is making a
positive difference.
In 2005, SIF, the only national membership association
dedicated to advancing the concept, practice and growth
of socially and environmentally responsible investing (SRI),
reported that only one out of nine investment dollars in the
United States was actively invested in socially screened port-
folios. That’s 11 percent of the $25.1 trillion in total assets
under management tracked in Nelson Information’s Direc-
tory of Investment Managers. From 2005 to 2007, SRI assets
increased more than 18 percent, while those of the broader,
professionally managed assets increased less than 3 percent.
“SRI, which today means sustainable and responsible
investing, has its modern roots in the 1960s, a tumultuous
decade that escalated sensitivities to issues of social respon-
sibility and accountability,” remarks Steve Schueth, president
of First Affirmative Financial Network, LLC. The investment
advisory firm specializes in serving socially conscious indi-
vidual and institutional investors.
Concerns regarding the Vietnam War, civil rights and
equality for women in the 1960s, broadened during the
1970s to include labor-management issues and anti-nuclear
convictions. “By the 1980s, millions of socially conscious
investors, churches, universities, cities and states were focus-
ing investment strategies on pressuring the white minority
government of South Africa to dismantle its racist system of
apartheid,” says Schueth. Then, when citizens around the
world were handed the Bhopal, Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez
incidents, “The environment shot to the top of the socially
26 Broward County
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