Impact-First Endowment

SK2’s endowment investments are aligned with our mission or values.

We believe foundations have a moral obligation to devote far more resources to their charitable missions. Investing the assets from our endowment in alignment with our mission objectives and values is a commonsense way to exponentially increase our impact.

Our endowment is carefully invested to both complement our mission and support broader progressive values. We believe the deepest impact comes from the private sector, and we’ve allocated approximately 63% of our endowment for investments in private sector companies, funds, and initiatives. The remainder is currently invested in public equities for diversification and liquidity reasons. Multiple screens and proactive criteria are in place to ensure we are investing in the best possible ESG leaders and minimizing harm done by large corporations.

We see SK2’s primary role as a foundation impact investor as providing flexible, affordable, and patient capital to socially and environmentally committed small businesses and funds. We are not trying to convince others that an impact-first investment strategy can reliably offer market rate returns. However, if the goal is simply preserving capital and earning 5% to spend on annual expense requirements, then an impact-first investing strategy is entirely feasible.

To address ongoing discrimination and overlooked opportunities, SK2 is also dramatically increasing investments in funds and companies led by women and persons of color. In the interest of influencing greater transparency in how foundations invest their resources, SK2’s current endowment investments, valuations, demographic data, and SDG alignment ratios are all available below.