Location New Haven, Connecticut Method Donations and Grants Current Committee Size 5 members | Area Served Global Endowment US$ 1 thousand | |
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Focus Socially responsible investing, Education, Student activism | ||
Dwight Hall Socially Responsible Investment Fund ("DHSRI", "Dwight Hall Fund") is a undergraduate-run socially responsible investment fund in the United States. Initially seeded with $50,000 from the Dwight Hall organization endowment, the fund is expected by the Dwight Hall Board of Directors and Trustees to grow to a $500,000 fundraising target. Managed by a committee of twenty undergraduate Yale College students, the fund makes use of traditional methods of Socially responsible investing(SRI) to have a positive environmental and social impact while aiming to outperform standard investment benchmarks and maximize financial return. The Dwight Hall SRI Fund pays out 4.25% of its value to Dwight Hall, which is the umbrella public service and social justice organization on Yale's campus.
Contents
History
Founded in 2007, the DHSRI fund was initially seeded with a $50,000 portion of the Dwight Hall at Yale Organization’s endowment . As the umbrella volunteer organization on Yale’s campus, Dwight Hall invests a large portion of its endowment with the Yale Investments Office, which is headed by the money-manager David Swensen. Originally created to align Dwight Hall endowment in a manner consistent with its mission, the DHSRI fund has become a model for student and community activism and has also provided additional transparency to Dwight Hall's investment practices. Along with the Responsible Endowment Project (REP) and the Yale Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR), the DHSRI fund has been relatively successful in terms of enforcing ethical and social responsibility standards on the Yale University endowment; in order to fit with its ethical considerations guidelines, the Yale endowment has ceased to further invest with the HEI Hotels & Resorts. In response to student protest, the Harvard Management Company has also agreed to look into HEI Hotels & Resorts over complaints about its business practices and labor policies. The launch of the DHSRI fund marked the first undergraduate-run socially responsible fund in the United States.
SRI & Measuring Impact
The DHSRI fund employs several traditional SRI techniques when it comes to investing. One technique that the Fund employs is that it invests with other established SRI funds which use environmental Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) to positive screen and actively look for companies that conduct business in desirable fields such as solar energy companies. Another technique is negative screening which is used to exclude certain industries such as alcohol, tobacco, weapons and ammunition, and pornography when making investments. A third SRI technique that the DHSRI fund uses is shareholder advocacy.
Currently, the DHSRI fund has invested a total of $20,000 in CDs (certificate of deposit) with New Haven Start Community Bank and the Community Bank of Bridgeport in order to promote increased lending to local small business owners in the area. Measuring the direct and indirect impact of such investments is difficult, but is one of the current projects of the SRI fund.
The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education
In 2011, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) awarded the DHSRI fund at Yale University a score of 0.25/0.25 on its Sustainability Tracking Assessment & Rating System (STARS). The STARS scoring system is applicable to any institution of higher education that offer business or economics coursework related to investment strategies. The basis on which credit is awarded is determined by whether or not the institution has a student-managed SRI fund through which students are able to develop skills in the field of socially responsible investing. There are currently 181 institutional participants in the STARS program and 173 institutional participants in the AASHE program.
College Endowments
This new active-investor role of endowments is particularly significant to college towns and its surrounding communities because the ever-increasing aggregate sum of college and university endowments worldwide has led to these higher-education institutions becoming significant players in the financial realm. In a bid to redefine the traditionally adversarial Town and gown relationship, student and faculty activism has enforced a new ethical standard on endowment investments and has also driven the creation of ethical advisory committees to monitor and oversee such institutional endowments. The twenty undergraduate committee members are currently working to help inspire the creation of similar funds at other colleges.
The Yale Endowment
As noted on the Yale Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) website, "Yale was one of the first institutions to address formally the ethical responsibilities of institutional investors." As a result, Yale published The Ethical Investor: Universities and Corporate Responsibility in 1972 and has used to it establish procedures on how members of a community can impact the investment decision-making process of university endowments. A copy of the Ethical Investor can be found on the ACIR website. In order to fit with its ethical considerations guidelines, the Yale endowment has ceased to further invest with the HEI Hotels & Resorts and has also divested from oil and natural gas companies in Sudan.