Black Lives Have Always Mattered at Calvert

               Actions taken on the BLM issue over the decades when I was Calvert chair.  Walking the talk. 

 

1.      Calvert Social Investment Fund was the first mutual fund, and one of the first institutional investors, to divest from South Africa over its moral objections to apartheid.  About 20 years later, Calvert sponsored the first venture fund to go into South Africa post-apartheid. 

2.     For many years, the Fund created an active advisory council that had semi-annual retreats with the board to discuss social issues applicable to the Fund’s raison d’etre.  This council consisted of ten people, most of whom were minority, and racial issues were always on the agenda and sometimes included sensitivity trainings.  Calvert was the first fund to implement an indigenous rights screen and notably engaged with the World Bank on the issue.

3.     The Fund filed many shareholder resolutions asking companies to be accountable to their employment practices with full EEOC reports and other disclosures such as board diversity and refused to vote for slates of directors that did not include minority representation.

4.      Calvert created an initiative in the industry as it became aware that no African American was running a mutual fund in the country.  The Fund teamed up with John Rogers, then a small time but good money manager, to form the Calvert-Ariel Fund managed by Rogers.  With the good track record, made public by being a mutual fund, Rogers had a stage in the investment community and is now the largest African American owned investment advisory.  Ariel Funds now have $12B in assets.  Chicago based Rogers was a helpful supporter to Barrack Obama in his political pursuits.

5.     Calvert also selected other African American managers such as Eddie Brown and Eugene Profit to sub-advise Calvert portfolios, which generated awareness of these promising managers as capable professionals.  It would be fair to note that Calvert had more minority managers than any other fund group and opened the door for more inclusivity in the parochial industry of the time.

6.     Calvert has always been proactive in its hiring.  Reggie Stanley for 12 years was the Chief Marketing Officer of Calvert and Ivy Duke served as General Counsel after many years as Associate Counsel.  The accounting firm KPMG was asked to partner with a minority firm to audit company finances.  Calvert sponsored Calvert Impact Capital which for ten years was run by Lisa Hall.  Calvert Impact Capital has deployed over $100m into low income communities. 

7.     Around 2010, Daryn Dodson, another African American, was recruited to manage the $60m Special Equities venture portfolio of Calvert.  The portfolio invested in a plethora of entrepreneurial firms, such as the first AIDS insurance company in South Africa, and institutions such as Community Capital Bank (Brooklyn) and CitiFirst (DC).  Daryn left Calvert after the Eaton Vance sale and formed Illumen Capital.  This fund of funds partnered with Stanford professors on issues of implicit bias and performs trainings with venture funds to help them identify and back minority entrepreneurs.