From Faith Values to Investment: An expanded FaithInvest report

FaithInvest has just completed an updated and significantly expanded version of our 2021 report: From Faith Values to Investment: A guide to faith-consistent investment policy and guidelines for institutional faith-based asset owners.

The revised version is organised around: the fundamentals of faith-consistent investing; establishing and managing comprehensive FCI programmes; and action items for advancing FCI within faith organisations. It contains four case studies from a variety of faith traditions to provide real world examples of leading FCI programmes and how they have applied their beliefs, teachings, and values to their investment practices.

The basic message of the updated report is unchanged. As described in the introduction: Faith traditions have long emphasised the importance of integrating moral and ethical values into every aspect of life. Accordingly, faith-based asset owners have an obligation to make a conscious effort to align their investable assets with their tradition’s deeply held beliefs and values.

Faith-consistent investing (FCI) provides faith-based asset owners with a roadmap for supporting the pursuit of transformative social and environmental change while honouring their obligation to prudently manage their financial assets. Faith-consistent investing is, however, challenging. Each faith has its own unique set of core values, governance structures, staff, capabilities, goals, etc, which often makes the development and management of a comprehensive FCI approach seem like a daunting task.

This document aims to address these challenges by:

• Providing an overview of the fundamentals of FCI;

• Outlining critical steps faith-based asset owners (FBAOs) can take to establish and manage a comprehensive FCI programme;

• Providing a resource for individuals that have been selected for roles with oversight of faith-based assets, such as senior management of FBAOs, staff responsible for administering investment programmes, trustees, etc.

The report is intended as a resource to assist FBAOs by providing them support in developing and adopting FCI best practices that increasingly allow for the deployment of investable assets in alignment with their core values and beliefs, while also honouring their fiduciary duty of prudent portfolio management.

We hope you enjoy the revised report and find it a useful resource for your FCI journey.

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