It’s time to be an inconvenient investor – findings and recommendations from the Endowments Investing Challenge

For the Endowments Investing Challenge we collaborated with a group of UK charities and foundations to run a public tender to find an investment service provider who could help us better align our capital with our missions.

Working with The Blagrave Trust, The Children’s Society, Cripplegate Foundation, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Vivensa Foundation we recruited seven young people aged 18-25 with lived experience of marginalisation to help shape the process.

Their uncomfortable questions – about conflict, genocide, social justice, pay gaps, and what it really means to invest for future generations – challenged us as asset owners and the investment firms who applied.

Five ISPs were shortlisted and, following their presentations at an event in March, Triodos Investment Management won with their Triodos Future Generations Fund.

So far, partners have now committed approximately £20 million of their investments to the shortlisted firms, including £12 million to Triodos.

The report shares what we learned, including: 

• Young people’s voices added accountability, but their views and difficult questions were too often sidelined 

• No perfect solution exists, but trade-offs can be balanced – you can’t currently maximise impact, return, and minimise risk simultaneously, but charitable investors should be uniquely placed to hold their course on impact 

• Traditional financial benchmarks are fundamentally inappropriate for impact investing – Huge tech companies dominate indices like MSCI World but don’t qualify for impact funds, creating an impossible comparison 

• Organisational alignment matters as well as products – we found genuinely values-aligned investment service providers, but pay gaps remain a major area for improvement. 

The report includes practical recommendations for both charitable investors and ISPs. It covers everything from addressing difficult ethical questions, to rethinking benchmarks and liquidity assumptions.

We also name investment service providers who stood out for their positive approaches to areas including impact, internal ownership and governance, transparency, and willingness to experiment with participatory approaches.

READ THE REPORT (link to external website)