On Wednesday, August 26, BASIC (Building a Sustainable Investment Community) hosted a fireside chat with Ivy Jack, Head of Equity Research at NorthStar Asset Management, and Omar Blayton, CFO at Sunwealth. Ivy and Omar provided their perspective on the current environment and explained how they are working to address issues related to systemic racism and inequality through their work. To start the discussion, Ivy and Omar discussed how their family experiences have informed their point of view and offered an action item that could spur change.

In honor of our 10th anniversary, BASIC would like to announce a new research grant for projects that benefit the ESG community. The topic and structure possibilities are broad, but the resulting knowledge would belong to the entire community and become part of the public domain. Please send proposals to grant@lists.bostonsri.org with a description of your project. The BASIC management team will allocate $500–$1,000 to the winning project(s).

On June 7, 2018, BASIC-Boston and Boston’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas alumni chapter collaborated on an event hosted by Hemenway & Barnes. BASIC-Boston co-president Sarah Smith moderated a panel that included:

• Michelle Friedman - ‎Executive Director of ESG Business Development at ‎MSCI Inc.

• Eric Packer - Financial Advisor at Progressive Asset Management

• Lauren Compere - Director of Shareowner Engagement at Boston Common Asset Management

BASIC’s tax reform event focused on both individual and investor implications. Rob Wilson, Research Analyst at MFS, outlined investor implications while Boston University Law School’s Director of Graduate Tax Reform, Christina Rice, detailed individual-level impacts. Please check out additional resources from Civic Series, our co-host for the event, here. Thanks to Sharon Bort for cultivating this list.

Imagine a world where you never have to carry your wallet or purse around. Your cellphone, a device you always have on hand, allows you to pay for your morning coffee, a ticket to your favorite movie, or even that sweater you’ve been eyeing for a while. Well, what was once considered science fiction, is now more science than fiction, as this has become a reality in China, where the rise of WeChat has revolutionized the mobile payment space. With mobile payments now surpassing $9 trillion a year, eight times greater than the US, the Chinese market has come to embrace their new cashless society.

On April 18, 2018, BASIC-Boston and the Corrections Accountability Project (CAP) collaborated on an event hosted by Zevin Asset Management. The speaker, CAP’s Bianca Tylek, described her organization’s formidable attempt to comprehensively list over 3,100 corporations involved in the prison industrial complex. Their report, The Prison Industrial Complex: Mapping Private Sector Players, can be found here.

On February 14, 2018, BASIC-Boston and Reporting 3.0 collaborated on an event hosted by Brown Advisory. The speakers, Reporting 3.0’s Bill Baue and Ralph Thurm conveyed an urgent message that business-as-usual is not going to cut it when it comes to achieving true long-term sustainability and that the ESG industry should not get lulled into thinking that current company disclosures are sufficient.

The future of impact investing was the hottest topic on my recent tour of the Boston impact investing conference circuit, which included the New England Impact Investing Initiative/Building a Sustainable Investment Community (BASIC), Boston’s Net Impact Summit, and the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference. My list of all the 2018 trends discussed at these events, has 20 trends on it! Wow, that’s a busy year. This blog post is my attempt to distill these trends into four buckets (many of which are linked).