Article by Julianne Zimmerman
This article is the third in our three-part series, So You Say You Want Impact. Read previous installments A New Hope and Choose Aligned Returns.
If you’ve read this far in our So You Say You Want Impact series, you are probably either an investor who already has defined impact objectives, or you are exploring how to orient your portfolio for impact. Either way, thanks for your continued attention!
In the previous two installments, we’ve debunked some prevalent misconceptions of impact investing and discussed the ways in which Adasina’s products enable aligned returns. Here, in the final part of our Adasina Difference series, we unpack impact expectations and detail the multifaceted ways that Adasina’s work extends beyond our products to demonstrate that investors really can have meaningful impact at the scale of the market.
Comprehensive Impact
Impact-seeking investors typically allocate to public markets impact asset managers in the hope of securing a future that is safer, healthier, more equitable and/or more prosperous than the present. In general, impact investment strategies achieve those ends by focusing on advancing better public companies or a better financial system.
Better Public Companies might be achieved via:
- Portfolio company engagement
- Proxy voting
A Better Financial System might be achieved via:
- Benefits to impacted communities
- Accountability to impacted communities
- Field building
- Staff diversity
Excellent impact asset managers do one of these really well. Truly standout managers might do two or more. Adasina does all of them. Our model is intentionally structured to advance social justice in everything we do; as a result, multidimensional impact is baked into all aspects of both our investment practice and our investor mobilization campaigns.
Better Public Companies
Through investor mobilization, company engagement, and proxy voting, Adasina is working to advance social justice at the scale of the market.
Within our own portfolio, Adasina conducts active company engagement through a combination of proxy voting and specific engagement initiatives, such as our board diversity initiative, which included direct outreach with more than 500 portfolio companies seeking data on board gender and racial diversity.
Informed by the guidance of our Social Justice Partners – which we discuss more thoroughly in the first installment of this series, A New Hope — we create unique datasets and investor education resources on the materiality of social justice issues for use in our investment products, campaigns, and engagement efforts. But we also share datasets and resources with the finance community at large, to equip other investors to strengthen their own strategies for exclusion and/or engagement with companies in their portfolios.
Because we believe in the power of community-centric action to make real transformative change at the scale of the markets, we also lead investor mobilization campaigns to educate and activate institutional investors on issues that span racial, gender, economic, and climate justice issues. These campaigns — designed hand-in-hand with our Social Justice Partners — aim to both bring together large numbers of investors to exercise their rights as owners of public company shares, and also to connect the social justice movement to the wider public markets. In so doing, we collectively urge companies to do better, and we collectively raise our industry standards for the benefit of all.
As of January 2025, our current mobilization campaigns have amassed over $1.25 trillion in signatory assets. The impact of these campaigns truly does improve the behavior of public companies. For example, our Ending Forced Arbitration for Sexual Assault Survivors yielded voluntary action by hundreds of publicly listed companies, and United States federal policy change that improved workplace conditions for more than 130 million workers.
A Better Financial System
We are anti-domination: we oppose the impulse to control and dictate, and instead work to inspire and act in collaboration. Our endeavors to elevate and transform the system of finance are an expression of our belief in the power of solidarity as both a tenet of social justice and the best way to effect real change. For this reason, Adasina’s work to build a better, more just financial system is entirely focused on expanding and deepening community across finance.
Our industry transformation efforts include launching initiatives like DD2.0 and Freedom Economy, in conjunction with broader field-building contributions such as birthing of community networks like the Racial Justice Investor Coalition and our leadership in initiating and shaping industry conversations around our sector’s so-called “best practices.” Our staff also serve on influential industry advisory and governing boards working to advance the state of the impact investing field.
At the heart of our work to advance a more just financial system is our unique and steadfast commitment to ensure that our work benefits and is accountable to impacted communities. We achieve that first and foremost by creating community-sourced Investment Criteria alongside our Social Justice Partners, whose wisdom informs the issues we elevate and how we define impact relative to those issues. Internally, Adasina’s Impact Team makes up 40% of our Portfolio Management Team, actively participating in portfolio decision making. We also look to our Stewardship Circle, a trusted group of advisors who are both knowledgeable in financial markets and leaders in social justice movements, for input on our investment portfolios and to provide accountability to the communities they represent.
Adasina is, of course, part of the financial system we are working to transform. Which means that, at a core level, change starts with us. Following our belief that transformed systems are best created by people outside of traditional power structures, our team, including our Portfolio Management Team, is composed of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ professionals — extraordinary leaders and practitioners representing communities and identities that have historically been excluded from financial decision making and generational wealth building.
Raise Your Impact Standards with Us
When it comes to capturing impact in your investments, more really is more. If you have been carrying an outdated model of impact investing as a fringe activity, accepting minimal or uni-dimensional impact in your portfolio, or feeling shackled to unaligned financial returns because you thought that was the best you could expect, now you know better.
As Dr. Maya Angelou famously quipped, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
For all the reasons we outlined in the first and second installments of this series, we believe that investing with us provides a sound way to pursue aligned returns — holistically serving your financial and social justice objectives with your entire portfolio. But as we’ve shown in this article, your investment with Adasina also makes a transformative system impact that ripples beyond your portfolio, benefiting public companies, the finance sector at large, people, and planet.
If that is the kind of impact you want in your portfolio, we invite you to embrace a bold future with us, one in which public markets investors generate long-term collective value — better meeting our own objectives while also creating meaningful benefits for all.
To join us, or to expand your existing portfolio holdings, please connect with us at invest@adasina.com. And if you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to our mailing list and follow us on LinkedIn to receive future news and content.