Impact Investing - Fully leveraging the TAF endowment fund
TAF is very interested in investing its endowment in a way that directly supports its organizational mandate. We therefore try to apply key considerations to our investment decisions (both lending activity and endowment fund investments):
- Does the investment offer competitive financial returns while meeting TAF's risk preferences?
- Does the investment advance action that has the potential to reduce Toronto emissions, such as through the development of clean energy or new energy efficiency products?
- Does the investment lower our carbon risk exposure?
In some cases, we will actively steer investment away from activities that we believe are leading to rising emissions.
As a relatively small investor, it is difficult for TAF to directly affect markets through our investment patterns alone. But we are increasingly seeking to use our knowledge, expertise and partnership skills to help influence other foundations and funds to follow TAF's example and develop impact investing approaches as well.
TAF adheres to the Principles of Responsible Investing published by the United Nations Environment Program and participates in the Carbon Disclosure Project, a rapidly growing group of private sector companies and other organizations that voluntarily report on carbon emissions as a way of providing investors and others with important information about the company's energy efficiency performance and carbon risk exposure.
For more on TAF's impact investing approach, see these presentations: