My role here today is to defend socially responsible investing. I believe we are not only an important but an essential component in what you do. I would like to speak to you about the importance of having a single advocate converted.

I began my career as a photocopy clerk despite my typing courses. It was true career in a brokerage firm. I saw people giving advice and it wasn't so good and thought I could do that too. So I started out doing it and giving bad advice too. I ended up in Harvard Square at a brokerage firm there. I felt like I couldn't sell my stock because I had inherited it from my father.

I started teaching Ethical Investing and decided to learn about it from Joan Bavaria. I met a peculiar person who was a catholic worker and spoke with a great deal of force. This was Chuck Matthei. He was in technical assistance and got tired of giving advice to people. He was the key person for me who launched community development and lending.

There are tremendous barriers to community development investment. I felt it was important where you did your banking and I wrote a chapter on this. This made me into an expert and I was able to join Chuck as a board member where I have met extraordinary people. The NACDLF has merged into the Community Capital Fund. It had a mission of economic justice, which i have to admit sounded a little communistic.

The next important step for me was the divesture of the economy in South Africa. I was thrown into the foray here and had a lot to say about South Africa. We saw how faith groups could be influential here. As I worked for the Peace and Justice office of the Episcopal Church. We put togehter a white paper and made an important study of what we could do in community service. We had the hanging judge of New York and had a 3 year session of meetings and after exhaustive background work and shouting matches we discovered that it doesn't matter that you call yourself trustees if you're a nonprofit and subject to business judgement which must serve to further your mission. We got $6m in order to do community lending. We ended up with several partnerships. I have long since lost track about how much money was leveraged through this. I wouldn't doubt that it is in the scale of $2-3B. It's because of the individuals who were willing to see this through 6 tedious years.

This process led me to being elected to the pension board of the Episcopal Church. I had started a company to do research to find out whether stocks were appropriate for socailly responsible investing. It's very hard to get things done on boards but I left many meetings very frustrated. On the community development side I had a very hard time getting anything done. We have in our church we have a general convention every 3 years. I told them that I could use a resolution from the church to find a way to do community investment. We had 11k Episcopalians who voted for this unanimously.

We hired a consultant who told us that we couldn't get the rate of return we wanted unless we could invest $100M and after delivering this difficult news, we decided to do it. Today we have $300M. After some investments including real estate, there were some reports that the church was becoming a slum landlord but after interviewing some of the tenants, we were happy to go ahead with this development.

If it had not been a person who was not advocate for socially responsible investments, I can tell you that these things would not have happened.

I have a couple of day jobs too with high net worth individuals and they ahve a complicated relationship with their money. They want to feel that they've left behind a legacy and not just do what their grandfathers did. My arena is borrowing from many people and lending to many people.

At my other day job is working with a mutual fund organization. There is no room for wiggle when your under the SEC. I was not able to support by making investment inot community development. We decided to have a second product. If you have a money market account at a bank, you have money in a bank. If it's with an investment firm, then it's with a number of different stocks. We decided to go with a hybrid. We have acted as a collection agent. We have been responsible for about $65M in deposits. In the scale of things this is not so much, but given that people would only find out about it if you're a Domini investor, it's pretty good.

We're cut out of the more innovative end of community development funds. We do have funds in credit unions and banks across the nation. Kirsten is on my board and has been very helpful. We got a pricing agency who could give the price to the NASD at the end of every day. The first most single onerous element of the audit every year by the SEC is the pricing. You want to have no fudge factor on this. This was also a key experience that showed us how important it is to have an individual dedicated to the community development.

In the wake of Katrina, Liberty Bank closed many of their branches. Our investors had to decide whether or not stay with them and we did and just priced our product differently because we were not going to receive interest on it. We made a suggestion that putting some deposits in Liberty Bank was another way of getting money to the people in the community.

No one else besides us know what your priorities are. I'm sure you all could tell stories like I have. We have been the entity that has allowed you to stay mainstream. Last night we looked at what the future of SRI is and I bvelieve it is to save the planet. I think we've come a long way in intergrating this into the mainstream. The investors have and can make demands on corporations for socially responsible decisions.

I was accused of using communist vocabulary but I will continue to talk about economic justice and bringing it into the entire arean.

Q: I appreciated your reference to the hope you represent in terms of the portal to the emerging network of socailly responsible and aware people. Are you doing anything differently now where you can rationalize the idea of being the collection agency?

Amy: The challenges of dealing with paper and phone calls in my industry are still there. We're a highly regulated industry but I do think the Domini bond fund is an innovation by making deposits directly into community development institutions. Calvert and Christian Brothers have also done things like this. My personal prejudice is that until you can break into mainstream finacnial behavior you miss the biggest commyunity. The fatal flaw is that I'm able to get money for under $20K. I've just learned how to get $1M vehicles. There is a big middle market there. REITs are some guy who used to be some guy from New York who had 13 buildings and now he can sell himself. You could do that too.

Q: I think a white elephant in the room which is return. We tried to get the paperwork done but the return we could meet was not enough to make investors interested. We resolved every other issue but the bottom line was that we just couldn't get there. I think we have to confront that. There will be opportunities for pieces of money here and there.

Amy: I think that's the middle market. I don't think I have a market rate loan in my portfolio. They're all under. I personally think that explicit subsidies can fill in here. I don't have any good answers but I do think it is beyond what the industry has up and running.

Please click on the image below to see a larger version