You’re a mission-driven organization with an investment portfolio, not the other way around. Does your manager know that?
If you run a foundation or a mission-driven organization, you probably didn't get into this work because you love portfolio management. But managing the assets that resource your work has become a critical part of your job. You have an endowment, or pooled assets, or long-term reserves, and somebody has to manage them.
Most organizations end up with a traditional asset manager. And for the most part, that works fine on the numbers. Valuations ebb and flow. The reports come in. The board signs off.
But something doesn't quite fit. Your asset manager builds a strategy around their proprietary models, not the specific liquidity (i.e. cashflow needs) and financial needs in your 5-year plan. They don't understand why your board cares about what's in the portfolio, not just how it's performing. They tend not to have well developed opinions regarding whether holdings conflict with your mission, and even when you bring it up, the answer feels like it's coming from a script. ESG this, green that, but ultimately, the investments stay the same.
This is the gap Just Futures was built to fill.
What's actually different about working with us
Just Futures isn’t a traditional asset manager that just bolted on an impact product. We were built to work with foundations and mission-driven organizations. That's the only thing we do.When we sit down with a client, we're working through four things: ways to align the portfolio with the organization's values, steps to help grow the assets at an appropriate risk level, approaches to help maintain year-to-year solvency, and methods to help preserve liquidity so the organization can meet its distribution goals. We believe every mission-driven organization has to balance all four. The question is whether your asset manager understands how they interact with your mission.
For example, a foundation in spenddown has different liquidity needs than one managing a perpetual endowment. A fundraising foundation will have different needs than one with a billion dollar endowment. An organization that wants community impact through its investments is making a different set of trade-offs than one that simply wants to screen out holdings that conflict with its work. We build a strategy around all four priorities together, because for mission-driven organizations, they can't be separated.
Every single one of us has worked at or with nonprofits. That means we already speak your language. We understand how investment committees work in a nonprofit context. We understand the fiduciary conversation and how mission alignment fits within it as a part of fiduciary duty, not a departure from it. We understand that your board might have strong opinions about what's in the portfolio and limited patience for jargon. These aren’t edge cases for us, it’s our main focus. We get it.
What that looks like in practice
The balance between these four priorities looks different for every organization.Some clients come to us focused on the basics. They want competitive growth, reliable access to working capital, and confidence that their holdings won't contradict their work. For them, values alignment means screening out sectors that would be hard to defend in the context of their mission: fossil fuels, private prisons, predatory lending. They want the money managed well and reducing harm in the meantime.
Others come to us wanting their portfolio to actively advance their mission. They're interested in community development financial institutions, affordable housing funds, or other vehicles that move capital toward the communities they serve. For these clients, impact is a primary goal, and they understand that some of those investments involve different return expectations.
Most organizations are somewhere in between. Or they're not sure yet. That's fine. We don't have a minimum threshold of impact ambition. We have a process for working through all four priorities together and building a strategy that fits your mission and goals.
A quick word on performance
We should say this plainly: working with a values-aligned asset manager does not mean accepting lower returns.
A meta-study by NYU Stern's Center for Sustainable Business, examining more than 1,000 research papers, found that the majority of investment-focused studies showed similar or better performance for values-aligned approaches compared to conventional ones. The effect was even stronger over longer time horizons, which matters for endowment managers thinking in decades.
This tends to surprise people who assume that any constraint on a portfolio is a drag on performance. But the data doesn't support that assumption.
One more thing about how we're built
Just Futures is a public benefit corporation. A third of our profits, and eventually a majority, will be shared with the nonprofit social movement organizations who own us. When you pay management fees to Just Futures, those fees don't just fund a management company. They fund the broader ecosystem of organizations working toward racial, environmental, and economic justice.
The reason to hire an asset manager is that they're good at managing assets and they understand your needs. They act as a proactive filter, keeping you informed of shifting market dynamics and help ensure your portfolio stays free of unwelcome surprises. They engender trust. But when you've established that, the question becomes: what else does your relationship with your manager do? With Just Futures, your fees fund nonprofit community work. That's our ownership structure, not a marketing position.
Starting the conversation
If you manage an endowment, pooled assets, or long-term reserves, and you've been thinking about whether your current setup really fits, we'd welcome the chance to talk it through. There's no minimum portfolio size and no minimum level of readiness. The conversation starts wherever you are.
~Mika Weinstein, CEO
~George Guerrero, Chief Investment Officer