The vast majority of the wealth in the foundation world is invested in a financial system that is systematically destroying natural life and increasing inequality across our planet. It's desire for growth at all costs at once creates working poverty, great wealth, mass extinction and global warming.
Fossil fuels represent a major part of most foundations investments.
GettyOur model is broken. It is time for foundations to sell our investments and start again. To take take every penny out of every investment and only reinvest it where we are clear that those companies we invest in are fundamentally regenerative for the planet and fundamentally equalising for society. If we cannot do this with absolute clarity, then we should not continue investing our capital and we should just focus on spending it.
Until we make this fundamental change those young people heading to the streets in climate strikes - emblematic of everything we should be supporting as a sector - are doing so to protest against us. We are profiteering from a system that we should be fighting not underwriting. It's time for a new approach.
It's not our fault: we didn't know, we didn't ask it to be this way, we didn't design these systems. Nor did any given banker or billionaire, regulator or Prime Minister. We do not need to feel guilty for the structures (and money) that we have inherited, but we will only find our moral anchor when we fundamentally reject those structures rather than hiding behind purposefully amateur mis-interpretations of charity law suggesting that we have no choice. We have a choice.
The system of investment management we ourselves are invested in, fundamentally ignores both human suffering and ecological limits. So long as this is true, the idea of screening investments, engagement and ESG filters can and will only ever be tinkering at the edges while we drive for growth. The foundation sector has been willingly conned by investment managers into believing that we are operating with morality when we are not.
Unless I have missed something, it seems relatively clear that the economic system that society and nature are serving, is not serving us back. It has created the social suffering, the inequality and the ecological collapse we try to fight against every day in our work. We simply do not have the moral right to profit from the worst of this system in order to maintain our position supporting the environment and the communities that it brutalises.
The narrative of 'growth at all costs' is killing our planet. Economies do not have a divine right to grow, indeed in the UK ours does not need to grow at all. There is enough money today to look after us all. There are enough calories to feed us all. There is enough space to house us all and preserve the vast majority of our countryside from chemicals and monoculture. There is enough for all of that. There is not, however, enough to feed the excess, the inequality and the endless growth we are currently trying to sustain.
A typical Foundation living on its investments will hold huge holdings in oil and gas companies, mining companies, chemical companies, businesses involved in intense deforestation, as well as the most extractive financial services companies. Meanwhile, there are many charities who stand by values that say that they would never take a penny from an oil and gas company, a company involved in deforestation, or a company financing that deforestation. And yet they are taking that money via us. With our lack of transparency, we are forcing charities into breaches of their own policies and staff into jobs that undermine their beliefs without them evening knowing it.
We have to start again without presuming a divine right to make money, simply by virtue of having it in the first place. This goes for those giving it away as much as those keeping it for private gain as it comes from the same system of inequity.
What the world needs desperately is the space to think about and create a model of being that serves humanity and nature in all of our interconnectedness. There is no one better placed to begin building that than our community of foundations who have longevity and independence, power and freedom and some of the most deeply thoughtful people you can hope to meet. They also have huge amounts of money if they choose to use them. The world needs us, our planet needs us and our communities need us.
It's time to cash out, step up and start again. We need to make sure that when the question comes in twenty years "what were you doing when the climate was breaking down and the science telling you so was on the front page of every newspaper?" that our answer is a good one.
