Divesting from Wall Street, Investing in Community

In a series for ImpactAlpha, Kataly’s Chief Investment Officer, Lynne Hoey, tackled this big question:

“Is it possible to fully divest from Wall Street and invest in community with hundreds of millions of dollars?”

Over the course of six articles, Lynne explores how foundations decide what is “enough” in terms of assets, and whether we can create an investment strategy in philanthropy that is aligned with racial justice, instead of just focused on the bottom line.

Below are links to all six pieces:

• How Kataly Foundation is divesting from Wall Street to reinvest in communities
  In her first piece kicking off this series, Lynne reveals what we learned when we dug into how we were investing our funds.
• A spend-out foundation asks, ‘What is enough?’
  Lynne explores how Kataly determined what was “enough” for us, and shares how we set our investment priorities, and the first set of challenges we faced.
• Wrestling with the greedy, predatory, wealth-hoarding history of the financial system
  Lynne delves into the history and context that created today’s financial system — a story of corporate greed, the hoarding of wealth, and predatory practices.
• Unpacking the experiments, barriers, and pivots: exploring community banking with Kataly Foundation
  Lynne reflects on our efforts to incorporate community banking into our investment strategy, and delves into the challenges that emerged as we experimented.
• Designing Kataly Foundation’s investment strategy for non-extraction and racial justice
  Lynne shares what our investment strategy looks like at Kataly: where we ended up investing our unrestricted reserve, and an unexpected challenge that came up with one of our potential partners, which led us to re-assess our plans.
• Why deep reflection is a prerequisite when investing for justice
  In her final piece, Lynne reflects on what it was like to share this journey, the connections to current invest/divest campaigns happening in the world, and the dangers of jumping to action before engaging in deep reflection first.

We hope this series offers a window into our journey on designing a values-aligned investment strategy, and welcome any questions. Kataly is constantly learning and evolving based on lessons from our work, and our partners—we hope to continue strengthening our investment strategy as we move towards spend out.