How Just Futures Strives to Create Better Investment Options for Regular People
How can regular people invest their hard-earned money to save for their future without harming low-income communities, people of color, and our one planet? We are working toward offering you increasingly values-aligned investment opportunities in both private and public markets.
Making private market social justice investments accessible
We are working toward offering you true social justice investing opportunities in private markets. These are products working to create a more prosperous world for everyday people. For example, NDN Fund supports resilient and regenerative projects in Indigenous communities. (It is also one of our Movement Trust partners!) Before we can offer you opportunities to invest in these projects, we have to overcome barriers like high minimum investment amounts, accreditation requirements, and residency requirements. We are working to do just that in two ways:
Social justice investment platform – We want to leverage technology to minimize social justice investing barriers. For example, tech-enabled models and platforms could create operational and cost efficiencies by standardizing due diligence and underwriting. It could also help social justice funds accept smaller dollar investments, e.g., $50 or $500 vs. a $50,000 minimum.
Self-directed brokerage window – Some retirement plan administrators allow clients to invest in products outside their standard funds. Recently, a few providers have let their clients invest in private market products, for example, cryptocurrencies. Just Futures is exploring how we might use the same approach to help streamline due diligence and transaction costs, thereby enabling our customers to invest in private community investment funds.
Improving public market investment products
While we research the private market innovations mentioned above, the public market investment products we are currently able to offer are limited. Investment products on the public market mainly prioritize profits ahead of working class people and our planet. So, we are also working to bring you public market offerings that we assess to be more social justice values-aligned than more typical funds. To that end, here’s what we are researching:
Social Justice Direct Index – Just Futures is constructing its own direct index model. It will use data-driven modeling to track traditional indices such as the S&P 500. Using such an index as a starting point, we seek to optimize for mission alignment around issue areas including:
We would then adjust the proportions of our investment in the remaining enterprises so the overall index’s performance - in terms of financial returns, risk, asset class, and style - maps closely to that of the original index. With this breakthrough, we would decrease our reliance on outside asset managers, who bundle stocks and bonds into mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) but do not share our rigorous social justice commitments. Instead of buying into their index funds, we will have our own product that we believe would be comparable in many ways, but more values-aligned.
Passthrough voting – This is an opportunity to improve public market investment products by changing publicly-listed corporations’ business practices. We want to make it easy for you to tell corporations you want them to behave in ways that align with your values. Typically, when you invest for retirement, you invest in mutual funds or ETFs. With this kind of investing, you do not hold shares directly in a company. Instead, you hold shares of a fund comprised of many companies. As a result of this structure, the fund manager, not you, gets to vote on major corporate decisions about, for example, worker rights, environmental issues, racial equity, who gets to be a board member, executive compensation, and mergers and acquisitions. Investor advocates, including As You Sow and Iconik, are pioneering technology to enable more everyday retirement investors to use passthrough voting. And we are joining this initiative. Increased data transparency will make it harder for those corporations to ignore our votes, especially if we exercise our collective power by voting as a bloc.
Let's make finance work for us
Historically and to this day, finance has served a small, wealthy, and privileged group. We want everyone to be able to retire with dignity, which is why we encourage you to invest. And if you, like us, value racial, social, and environmental justice, then we feel confident that our services align more with your standards than other retirement plan administrators.
With your help, we are expanding what’s possible.
If your employer doesn't offer a retirement plan, or if they contract with a different administrator, we’d love to show you the Just Futures advantage! You can reach us at info@justfutures.com.
Just Futures uses rigorous analyses to provide you with progressive investment options. Meanwhile, we are working to improve our current financial system to be able to, over time, offer you increasingly better places to put your retirement savings.