Our approach to investment
When you choose to create a Forever Fund with us, you can trust that we’ll carefully manage your donations to provide vital support for Somerset be, today, tomorrow and forever. Our goal is to ensure that the funds we manage for our donors grow in line with inflation while generating a reliable annual income to support our grants programmes and wider charitable work.
Through our investments, we also aim to generate positive social and environmental impacts and contribute to a sustainable world through our approach to investment.
We manage our investments through a unique arrangement with 3 neighbouring community foundations in Devon, Dorset and Wiltshire. This means we can share our knowledge and expertise in setting our investment strategy, hiring investment managers and monitoring the performance of our investments. This helps us achieve a broader diversification in our investments (spreading them across different areas) than investing on our own, which reduces risk.
Our funds are currently managed by our 3 investment managers CCLA, Evelyn Partners and Sarasin & Partners.
We understand the importance of matching our investment approach to investment practices with our missions and values and require our investment managers to follow responsible investment best practice. They must be signed up to the UN Principles of Responsible Investment and participate in Climate Action 100+. This is an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters are taking action on climate change.
We also require our investment managers to screen out companies that generate 10% or more of their revenue from:
- adult entertainment
- gambling
- manufacturing indiscriminate armaments [weapons with effects that can’t be controlled] and civilian firearms
- tobacco production, distribution and retail.
Want to focus more on ethical or sustainable investment? We’ll be happy to work with our investment managers to find a suitable fund or investment approach that works for you.
