This spring, I’ve been spending a lot of time connecting with a number of you in person, through dinners and coffees. (This is my absolute favorite thing about the work that I do, btw.) Listening to what’s on your minds; soaking in the stories; hearing about your money goals and visions. 

At these gatherings, there tend to be recurring themes: 

Everyone is falling somewhere on the concerned-to-anxious spectrum about the direction of our country, politics, the world, the climate.

Almost everyone is feeling that they want to take some sort of action to shift the direction — but they aren’t sure how.

Many are recognizing that their money is a form of power: That the wealth they've built can be used as a means to “vote” for a world that they want to live in.  By how they donate it, certainly, but also by how they spend and how they invest it.

There is a real desire to invest in other women, and a recognition of the collective positive impact that this can have on a broad range of levels: societal, economic, financial.

So how do we do this?

To date, the options have been pretty limited. At one end of the spectrum, one has been able to invest in the equities of public companies with better gender track records through a mutual fund or an ETF. 

At the other end of the spectrum has been angel investing in start-ups run by women and other underrepresented groups. These have the advantage of getting money directly into the hands of women. But it represents a huge step up in risk: and these investments (or angel investing groups) can be hard to find. Plus, few people have the experience and expertise to do proper due diligence. They are thus only appropriate investments for a sliver of investors and of one’s investment portfolio. 

That space in between those two options is what we've been tirelessly working to fill at Ellevest, in our Private Wealth offering. 

We approach this as a fiduciary for our clients, with decades of experience in investing. We find these investments through a second-to-none network of women investors and operators. Then, we take a rigorous due diligence approach to assess the financial and impact returns, while also assessing the financial and operational risks. 

Our impact-focused investments break down some of the barriers that exist by offering clients more opportunities to find their own risk-profile sweet spot between angel investing and traditional investments. 

An example: In equities, we offer the Ellevest Intentional Impact portfolios, a personalized investment strategy, using thousands of data points, to enable you to invest with a gender lens, or an anti-racism lens, or a climate lens. As an example, for diversity, these portfolios dive deeper than looking at the diversity of a company’s management, to assess the impact of a company’s policies and practices on women, including things like the impact of fossil fuels or firearms. (These disproportionately hurt women.) 

In the fixed-income sphere, the Ellevest Municipal Impact Strategy, allows you to invest in municipal bonds specifically focused on the use of proceeds of each bond and its environmental and/or social impact in areas like academic achievement, economic development, and health care. 

And then there’s our powerful array of private alternatives — this is where we believe Ellevest’s offering is truly unique. This includes funds like Cross-Border Impact Ventures, which invests in women’s health worldwide, and the RevUp Athena Growth Fund, investing in early-stage companies with overlooked founders.

So what happens when we invest in women? 

The research tells us that investing in women and the issues that disproportionately affect women can drive higher financial returns and positive impact. 

The bottom line: a better world.

Let’s keep shifting the conversation — and creating positive impact — together.