How sustainable are your college’s investments? That’s the question a new measurement structure, announced Thursday by an education-oriented nonprofit, is seeking to answer.
The Intentional Endowments Network said its method, called the Endowment Impact Benchmark, would allow institutions to gauge their progress on social and environmental objectives, and be compared to peers. The organization started testing its program by examining five institutions, including the huge, University of California (endowment: $21 billion), and the small, Lewis & Clark College (endowment: $308 million).
“Hopefully, this will become the norm for endowments,” says Georges Dyer, executive director of 10-year-old IEN, in an interview about the method. “It can be hard to compare apples to apples.”
BlueMark, a firm that verifies sustainability status for companies and investors, will be the independent third party to certify IEN’s results, he said. BlueMark will provide endowments “with high-value feedback” about their sustainability picture, IEN added in its news release.
The five endowments were the first to be evaluated, and 15 more will undergo the process in coming months to ensure it is valid. Each institution is awarded a ranking denoted by competition-style medals, in ascending order: participant, bronze, silver, gold and platinum.
Of the initial quintet, only Lewis & Clark won platinum, and the lowest award, silver, went to the California State University Foundation ($52 million), which funds the state system’s smaller schools. Earning the platinum rating “is a gratifying validation of Lewis & Clark College’s dedication to sustainability and principled action in our investing approach,” said Andrea Dooley, the school’s chief financial officer and vice president of operations, in a statement provided by IEN.
Dyer would not spell out why each institution deserved its ranking, other than to say that “all five are relative leaders” among higher-ed institutions on impact investing. In IEN’s brochure, the description of Lewis & Clark’s sustainability efforts was the most extensive, and it contained the lone mention of emissions targets for its portfolio holdings: down 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2040. The other two institutions were the Arizona State University Foundation ($1.5 billion) and the University of Toronto (U.S. $3.8 billion).
The IEN announcement comes amid the launch of other methods to assess sustainability efforts. Among those is ISS ESG, a unit of ISS, owner of CIO; it aims to measure investment portfolios’ alignment with standards of such organizations as the International Energy Agency
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Tags: BlueMark, Endowment Impact Benchmark, environmental, Georges Dyer, IEN, Intentional Endowments Network, Lewis &Clark College, social, Sustainability, University of California