Moving Forward

Joan Bavaria wrote this column, From the President, for the past 15 years. Joan was passionately engaged with the world on many levels, more than any person I have ever known, and her columns reflected her humanity. From the small to the large, from the individual to the global, her deeply personal columns tied her observations of the world to the need for action and a call for our engagement in creating a better world. Joan died on November 18, 2008 after an extended and courageous battle with ovarian cancer. Our world is much the lesser for her passing, and we miss her profoundly.

Joan’s unending optimism and enthusiasm impelled us forward. In October 2000 Green Cross International President Mikhail Gorbachev and Global Green USA honored Joan with the Millennium Award for Corporate Environmental Leadership.  At the ceremony, President Gorbachev proclaimed that “History is not pre-ordained.” Joan personified that idea. Whatever she faced, I never saw her show the slightest sign of doubt that persistence, dialogue, and engagement could overcome obstacles. She would square her shoulders, beam her engaging smile, and plunge in. She believed that any social structure, any human institution, is susceptible to change – and her life and work is proof of this.

I visited Joan on November 5, the day after the election. She was thrilled that Barack Obama had won. By that time, she was very frail, and she dozed off and on. But every time she roused, she opened her eyes, gave me a huge smile, and said, “WE have a new President!” She also told me, very firmly, that “Isaiah was wrong, you know!” Apparently she had had a conversation with my son Isaiah, now a senior in college, when he was about twelve. He had been despairing of the political and economic climate. She had told him that the world was moving in his direction, becoming more multicultural, more mixed-race, and that we would soon see enormous changes in our political leadership. He told her, with all the certainty of the young, that he would never see a black president in his lifetime. I replied that Isaiah would evidently have to eat some crow, at which she scrunched up her face and said “Crow is nasty! He shouldn’t eat crow – he needs to eat his hat!” Isaiah complied, emailing Joan a picture of himself munching on his cap. She was delighted, printed a copy, and showed it to her visitors after that. How very like Joan – to remember a conversation a decade ago with a young man, to delight in every sign of progress toward a more just and better world, to remind us all of the unlimited need for hope and the boundless possibilities for positive change.

So – we here at Trillium Asset Management Corporation pledge to move forward, chin up, full of optimism and determination to create the opportunity for change!

Trillium Founder Joan Bavaria Named a Mover and Shaker by Financial Planning Magazine

Click on link below to view article

Movers and Shakers

Financial Planning Magazine, January 2009

Schwab Institutional Honors Joan Bavaria

Joan Bavaria honored with Charles R. Schwab IMPACT Award^® for her vision and leadership in the investment advisory business

On September 25, 2008  Schwab Institutional^® announced that Trillium Asset Management Corporation (“Trillium”) founding president and CEO Joan Bavaria was recognized with the 3rd annual Charles R. Schwab IMPACT Award – an award honoring Joan as an individual trailblazer whose sustained vision, outstanding leadership, client commitment and community engagement clearly demonstrate the value of independent investment advice. The IMPACT Awards^® are an industry-wide awards program to honor advisors and firms that have advanced the industry through their visionary leadership, operational excellence, technology innovation, and impressive growth.

Joan Bavaria, widely recognized as one of the early pioneers in socially responsible investing, is a true visionary in the investment advisory field.  She founded Trillium in 1982 with a focus on serving clients with a concern for the social and environmental impacts of their investments. Today, Trillium is the largest independent investment management firm in the U.S. dedicated solely to socially responsible investing, with 40 employees and more than $1 billion in client assets.

For nearly 40 years, Joan’s vision has been to use the capital markets as mechanisms for social change.  An early innovator in the concept of community investing and microfinance, she helped bring the community loan fund idea to Wall Street.  At Trillium Joan has created a workplace that is a sustainable model for long-term employee ownership: the firm is majority employee- and woman-owned and donates five percent of pre-tax profits to charitable causes.  Trillium offers a progressive set of employee benefits and maintains a strong, diverse board of directors.

In 1981, Joan co-founded the Social Investment Forum, the national organization that serves as the primary association for practicing social investment professionals. She is the founding chair of Ceres, a national network of investors, environmental organizations and other public interest groups working with corporations to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change.

“It is an honor to win this award,” said Joan. “I proudly accept it while also acknowledging the many wonderful collaborators who inspired me and shared my belief that investors could balance their social values and financial objectives.”

Schwab Institutional presented Trillium Executive Vice President Cheryl Smith with an IMPACT Awards trophy at a ceremony during IMPACT^® 2008, one of the country’s largest annual gatherings of independent investment advisors.  Joan was granted a donation from Schwab Institutional to her charity of choice, the Opportunity Finance Network’s CARS™ program. The CARS™ program is a comprehensive third-party analysis and rating system of community development financial institutions which aids investors in their underwriting process.

Profiles and videos on the IMPACT Awards winners are available online at impactawards.schwab.com.

View the Joan Bavaria video here.

Changing the World, One MBA at a Time

The change we want to see in the world is being created by activists, artists, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, responsible investors and … MBAs. Yes, MBAs! Given that corporations have become the dominant institutions on the planet, this represents a much-needed revolution from within, augmenting all the good work making a positive difference from the outside.

I recently spent four days at Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) as a Change Agent in Residence, joined by the renowned Native American environmentalist Winona LaDuke, the nation’s leading expert on employee ownership Corey Rosen, and the Chief Operating Officer of the Gates Foundation Cheryl Scott. BGI is a pioneering leader in sustainable business education and in just five short years is already developing an international reputation for its authentic and powerful learning community, infusing sustainability throughout a business curriculum.

BGI’s motto, Let’s Change Business for Good, is reflected in each and every course listing, such as: “Finance, Accounting and the Triple Bottom Line,” “Classical & Ecological Economics,” “Sustainable Operations,” and “Creativity and Right Livelihood.” The school’s popularity is growing like a weed, fostering a new generation of socially conscious, highly skilled business leaders.

BGI’s innovative delivery model includes nine long weekends per year on Bainbridge Island, WA at IslandWood’s 255-acre environmental learning center. This uber-green, gorgeous setting helps attract some of the most innovative professors from other, more traditional institutions around the country. The academic faculty co-teaches courses along with creative entrepreneurs and experienced business professionals. IslandWood’s ecological simplicity adds to the monthly BGI magic, recharging the action-oriented innovators to continue pushing the boundaries of sustainable business practice. A web-based, distance learning and social networking platform called The Channel knits the community together in between the monthly convenings.

The long BGI weekends are called Intensives, and it is no doubt intense to spend what feels like 72 continuous hours immersed in inter-generational teamwork, research, presentations, networking and socializing. In their first year, BGI’s students engage in action learning projects within corporations, helping engineer sustainability into existing business models. In their final year, students form teams to design entrepreneurial, sustainable businesses from scratch, and some of these are becoming a reality.

The risk-taking and enchanting founders of BGI, Gifford and Libba Pinchot, acted from the deep belief that fundamental reform of business education is required for positive systemic change. In recognition of their inspiring achievement, BGI won the inaugural Joan Bavaria Award for Innovation in Building Sustainability into the Capital Markets at April’s Ceres conference in Boston. The development of entrepreneurs rooted in the multiple bottom lines of profit, people and planet is laying the groundwork for a more sustainable and conscious capitalism, consistent with Joan’s and Trillium’s mission over the last quarter-century.

BGI now needs to take another leap and focus on its own long-term sustainability, including more expansive fundraising and the development of a diverse and engaged leadership Board. I have been asked to serve as a Trustee at BGI, and look forward to working with this joyous and energetic community to change business for good.

Announcing the Joan Bavaria Awards

I am a battered boss. One of our employees, who will remain nameless, has cajoled, flattered, and even threatened me to write on a certain topic in this quarterly newsletter. The threatening person in question reports directly to me, so the fact that she gets away with it is a function of something in my childhood I’d rather not examine. To give you a sense of what I’ve experienced, here’s a direct quote:

“If one of us writes about it, it will be in that overly serious, honorific tone that you seem uncomfortable with (although of course, who isn’t secretly honored & uplifted by public acclaim?) and that you’ll get enough of during the Ceres conference when the award winners are announced. Only YOU can write about this with the perfect mix of humility and gratitude befitting such an honor.”

So as directed, I am announcing the first annual Joan Bavaria Awards for Building Sustainability into the Capital Markets. The awards will be presented at the Ceres 2008 Conference to be held April 29-30, 2008 in Boston. Failure to covet “honorific tones” does not dim my enthusiasm for these awards, the topics are so important to me. The awards were invented by a group of employees led at Trillium by Blaine Townsend and an equally great group of Ceres staff members.

Two awards may be given each year. The Impact Award will go to an investor, company, or nonprofit group that has contributed a specific achievement resulting in lasting movement of the capital markets from a system focused on short-term profits toward one that balances financial prosperity with social and environmental health. The Innovation Award will go to an investor, company, or nonprofit group whose recent work has the distinct potential to be a catalyst for long-term change of the same kind.

The point is to encourage people to think about how to make our economic system more sustainable. Many awards focus on corporate or individual specific achievements. In contrast, these awards will be given to those visionaries have examined how capital markets are working and found a way to change expectations, outcomes, rules or customs beyond their own company or organization that encourage collaboration, far-sighted planning, compassion and fairness. The panel of judges is brilliant, thoughtful and dedicated.

This year we have watched yet another “bubble” burst on Wall Street. When the dust has settled, we will again know that much of the bubble was driven by greed – greed that awards the accumulation of money with no thought about the impact the process is having on ordinary people, the larger system long term, or even their own organizations. Smart people are afraid to jump off the train until everyone crashes at once.

Yet there are some great things happening, too, and it’s on the great things that the awards are designed to focus. You can find out all about them at http://www.ceres.org/bavaria_awards. And, of course, if you have someone you would like to nominate, the instructions are on the web sites.

Fifth Annual Green Cross Millennium Awards.(Archive)

Trillium Asset Management president and founder Joan Bavaria was recently honored by Global Green USA and Green Cross International President Mikhail Gorbachev with a Millennium Award for Corporate Environmental Leadership. The ceremony took place on October 13, 2000 in Los Angeles at the Fifth Annual Green Cross Millennium Awards.

The awards were formed to recognize the work of individuals and organizations which “embody the mission of fostering a global value shift toward the environment.” As a Millennium Award recipient, Ms. Bavaria is recognized for her leadership in founding and heading Trillium Asset Management and for promoting and advancing socially responsible investing throughout the financial industry. Her founding of and ongoing work with CERES was also noted for “helping create tremendous shifts in the corporate world.”"Mikhail Gorbachev was impressive and inspirational,” said Ms. Bavaria after meeting with the once-leader of the former Soviet Union. “His dedication to human rights and the global environment is very obvious when you meet him. I will never forget him saying, several times, ‘history is not pre-ordained…’ He should know!”Past Corporate Environmental Leadership Award recipients include Ray Anderson of Interface, Sir John Browne of British Petroleum, Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Farms, and Jim Quinn of Collins Pine. Other Award category recipients include Ted Turner and the Turner Family, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Pierce Brosnan, and former Senator George Mitchell.

Other winners of the 2000 Millennium Award were: Lauren Shuler Donner and Richard Donner, film producers (Entertainment Industry Environmental Leadership Award); John Adams, President, Natural Resources Defense Council (Individual Environmental Leadership Award); Richard N. Goldman, Founder, The Goldman Environmental Prize (International Environmental Leadership Award); and S. David Freeman, General Manager, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (Local Environmental Leadership Award).

Global Green USA was founded in 1994 by activist and philanthropist Diane Meyer Simon, after Mikhail Gorbachev invited her to join his global environmental movement, Green Cross International. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Green Cross International has affiliates in 26 countries. The annual Millenium Awards dinner and ceremonies have become one of Los Angeles’ most popular social events as the awards gain recognition as an important environmental honor.