Social Innovation Fund Grantee, Sustainable Endowments Institute, Interviewed on PBS
This spring, Mark Orlowski, executive director of Sustainable Endowments Institute (SEI) was interviewed on the Emmy Award-winning PBS newsmagazine NOW created by Bill Moyers and currently hosted by David Brancaccio.
SEI, received a grant from the Social Innovation Fund (formerly called New Initiatives Fund) at RSF Social Finance when it was newly formed.* SEI seeks to empower colleges to become engaged shareholders to ensure that hundreds of billions of endowment assets are invested in a socially responsible manner. 746 colleges own combined endowment assets of close to $290 billion but only a small percentage vote on a broad range of social and environmental shareholder resolutions (less than five percent in the 2005 proxy-voting season) and many are not transparent about their holdings.
In the interview, Mark highlighted Middlebury College as a school that has recently become more active with its endowment by starting to vote on shareholder resolutions. “I’m happy to report that it was the grant from the Social Innovation Fund that enabled the Sustainable Endowments Institute to help students at Middlebury work with the administration,” he tells RSF Social Finance. “As a result, the college became the first school in the state of Vermont that we know of to actively vote on shareholder resolutions!”
Recently, SEI published a College Sustainability Report Card, which grades 100 leading colleges by looking at campus greening practices and endowment policies. “When it comes to sustainability,” Orlowski says, “the key questions about these institutions are how sustainability factors shape the way they use their resources and how schools can learn from each other and adapt sustainability policies that work.” In the report, four schools earned level “A” grades, twenty-two earned level “B” grades, fifty-four earned level “C” grades, and twenty earned level “D” grades.
The video and transcript of the interview are available on the PBS website. The full College Sustainability Report Card is available on Sustainable Endowment Institute’s website.
* Please consider making a tax-deductible gift to the Social Innovation Fund. The Social Innovation Fund supports and recognizes the creation of new initiatives that have the capacity for growth and eventual financial independence. These grants are only possible because of gifts to RSF. For more information, please visit our “Donate Now” page or contact Kelley Buhles at 415.561.6152.
Monday, July 23rd, 2007