Natural Investing is for Everyone!
At Natural
Investments we believe that most people want to be helpful and kind,
and that most want to leave the world a better place for their
children and future generations. We believe that these qualities are
"natural", and that it is natural to include these basic
human tendencies in every decision. We define "Natural
Investing" as actively seeking to balance the need for financial
return with the yearning to make life a little better for others and
the Earth.
We serve clients large and small with
customized portfolios that fulfill each person's social and
environmental concerns. To do this, we work with mutual funds,
stocks, bonds, and other instruments, using three natural investment
strategies:
Community Investing - puts money into
the hands of local people who are building economic justice in
communities around the world.
Corporate Investing - avoids
companies and industries that do harm, seeks companies that work for
a better world, and uses shareholder activism to change companies
from the inside.
Regenerative Investing - the next
generation of natural investing, financing deep green sustainability
and social justice enterprises.
We are excited to be pushing the edge
of the socially responsible investment world, building on two decades
of investment success and innovating for a better world. Join us, and
together we can help create the world we all want to live in!
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THE CORPORATE CONUNDRUM
There is hardly a more polarizing term
in the economic arena than CORPORATION. For Wall Street's
proud capitalists, corporations are revered as humanity's greatest
invention, a brilliant way to pool capital and talent so that the
needs of society can be met in an efficient manner. But for others -
including many progressive thinkers - the mention of "the C-word"
conjures images of greedy executives conniving to extract maximum
profit, with nary a thought for the destruction of the planet and
abuse of workers.
Natural Investments takes a more
engaged approach to this complex topic. We start with the simple
awareness that - like it or not - corporations are the dominant
player on the economic stage. The history of the corporation (see
chapter 1 of our book, Investing with Your Values: Making Money and Making a Difference, 2000) has been
one of increasing corporate influence over every aspect of life...
even our government.
Do aspects of the corporate agenda endanger our
democracy, social justice, and the global environment? Absolutely.
But corporations have also given us amazing technologies, medical
advances, and - for at least a small portion of the world's
population - a superb quality of life. Each of us, as investors,
consumers, and citizens, must be conscious of how we interact with
corporations.
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Community Investing is a powerful local
approach to putting your money to work in the service of your values.
By providing hardworking individuals and organizations with the
financing they need to help themselves, Community Investing offers
solutions to many twenty-first century challenges, from inner-city
decay to the decline of the rain forests.
Anyone who remembers banker
George Bailey's service to his own hometown in the movie It's
a Wonderful Life realizes that community banking is hardly a new
idea. It boils down to investing money in the people who are making
the community a better place to live.
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As individuals and
as a company, we at Natural Investments have consistently found
ourselves at the leading edges of creating the change we want to see
in the world. In our communities, we tend to work with innovative
collaborators whose experiments in architecture, agriculture, and
community planning are often ahead of the curve.
So it's no
surprise that we also find ourselves looking beyond the
readily-available investment vehicles as we work to push our economic
system toward more constructive expressions. As great as it can be
to invest in an alternative-energy mutual fund, or support a
community development loan fund with a low-interest loan, we want to
do more. We call this relatively uncharted realm "Regenerative
Investing".
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What is Natural Investing? 
