For decades, Natural Investments has shared the collective impacts of our social, economic, and environmental investments and activities via our newsletters. In recent years, these took the form of an annual impact report.
Though committed to operating as a triple-bottom-line enterprise for many years, in transitioning to a Public Benefit LLC under Delaware law in 2023, we can now legally consider both financial and non-financial factors when making decisions without violating our fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the company. As part of the legal requirement to publish a biennial public benefit report, we have merged these two concepts to create our first Impact & Public Benefit Report.
In this report, we highlight our firm’s primary public benefits: the positive impact of our investments on people, enterprises, and communities; our industry leadership and advocacy in helping to evolve capitalism; and our work to model conscientious operational practices and ownership and broadly share these innovations.
We provide data and stories about meaningful impact investments, summarize our corporate and government advocacy efforts to shift the economic system, illustrate the effects of our decades of thought leadership, and highlight our racial equity work and charitable giving.
Last year marked our first full calendar year as a trust-owned company, with the main highlight being that we’re in terrific shape.
We continue to fulfill our fiduciary responsibility to clients while empowering new voices and mentoring new leaders for strategic decision-making and company oversight. The firm also provided advisors with their first profit-sharing payments.
Distributions were previously only made to owners, but now all advisors share equally in the firm’s profits, regardless of tenure or the amount of assets they manage. This intentionally prioritizes financial benefits for newer advisors with smaller revenue streams in a growth stage of their practices. They are the ones who will steward the company long after the founders and elder advisors retire.
To illustrate this point, the past year featured a variety of personnel transitions within the firm:
- Scott Secrest, our fifth advisor who was with us for 20 years, sold his San Luis Obispo practice to Brittany Damico, who has been in our industry in various roles for many years.
- Greg Garvan, a veteran 28-year advisor, also retired, with his son Evan Quirk-Garvan returning to the firm in his place after a five-year hiatus, and joining his brother Brady. Evan is based in Asheville, N.C., and Brady is based in Charleston S.C.
- Amy Pender added an advisor to her team, Isaac Goldowitz, who is based in New York City.
- In the realm of support staff, Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole added Nyia Hawkins to their team; Nicole Middleton Holloway added Alejandra Nañez to her practice; and Malaika Maphalala added Tiana Dunn to her Hawai’i-based team.
We’ve also evolved the demographics of our previously all-white male team. See Our Evolution by the Numbers to the right. This is a major shift from the 80 percent white male ownership pattern that existed until 2023.
We’ve also primarily focused our impact work upon six pillars: capital deployment for racial justice and equity, charitable contributions, shareholder advocacy, proxy voting, public policy, and thought leadership and education. I dive further into these topics in my Impact & Public Benefit Report, outlining our work in each pillar and how we are working to make our investments work for the betterment of the planet, the people, and the advancement of justice and equity. As always, we are very grateful for our clients’ commitment to being agents of positive change through their portfolios and for entrusting us with the responsibility of stewarding these assets.
-Michael Kramer, Manager
Michael Kramer joined Natural Investments in 2000 after 10 years as a client. A 16-year former partner, he is now a Trust Steward.