Partnering on the Endowments for Impact Challenge
The Reichstein Foundation, Dusseldorp Forum, Besen Family Foundation, and Oranges & Sardines Foundation are proud to be partnering on the Endowments for Impact Challenge, and we’re inviting other trusts and foundations seeking mission-driven investment advice to join us.
Historically, Australian trusts and foundations have pursued a dualistic approach to granting and investing, with granting driven by vision, mission and values and investing confined to generating income.
In recent years, trusts and foundations have increasingly begun to deploy their investments in pursuit of their missions. With Australian grant-makers holding over $50 billion in investable assets, the impact of this burgeoning shift is significant.
However, many trusts and foundations making this shift rely on external advisors to develop and implement their investment policies and have met challenges in identifying appropriate support, including:
- the dominance of advisory business models that favour efficiencies of scale over the flexibility required to accommodate clients’ specific missions and objectives
- differentiating greenwashing from credible responsible investment advice and products
- the tendency for some investment committees to defer to their advisors, stymying the potential for a robust exchange that draws on trusts and foundations’ unique mandates, relationships and expertise.
To date, trusts and foundations have not tended to work collectively to address these issues and their experience selecting and working with advisors is shared on a limited and informal basis.
Drawing on similar models from the UK and Canada, the Endowments for Impact Challenge (the Challenge) offers a different approach.
The Challenge is a collective, public tendering competition designed to identify, challenge and promote investment practitioners who are most suited and values-aligned to the requirements of investing charitable endowments.
