It is both a pleasure and a privilege to introduce our speaker to you tonight, but it will not be an easy task to tell you about her or to fit her many accomplishments into a brief minute or two. Fortunately her years of leadership in the field and previous participation on the Governing Board of ICCR mean that she is already known to many of you in this room.
Amy Domini is a Managing Principal at Domini Social Investments, a socially responsible mutual fund family that has grown to over $2 billion in assets under management. She is also a private trustee for socially responsible investors at Loring, Wolcott & Coolidge in Boston, a founder of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini & Co., a leading corporate accountability research firm, and a Trustee of the Episcopal Church Pension Fund. She is a great dancer, an accomplished gardener and a proud mother of two teenage boys.
Amy is an author (with her latest book tentatively titled Making Money While Making a Difference which will be coming out early next year), an advocate for those without a voice, and a spokesperson for the industry. She is recognized by her peers in social investing and by mainstream financial press, including the likes of Money Magazine and Barrons, as an influential leader and a visionary.
It was in my first weeks of working with Amy that I knew I was in the presence of someone who would leave this world a better place. I was impressed by her commitment right from the start. She was writing various shareholders of the Domini Social Equity Fund to inform them that in the post-Apartheid era the call had come from within South Africa to begin to reinvest and to alert them that the Fund would no longer screen out companies doing business in that country. It was then that I discovered Amy knew that the individual investor and individual decisions mattered. It was my first window into Amy’s understanding that responsibility was a global concept.
In recent years Amy has focused her efforts on extending socially responsible investing’s reach by such initiatives as disclosing proxy voting on her mutual fund website and challenging her peers to do the same. She is increasingly focused on SRI becoming global, not so much in screened funds being investment options for everyone but in fundamentally reforming the global financial system.
For Amy socially responsible investing is more than a choice, it is a calling – to do not only what can, but what must be done to reform the financial system so that justice is not a word but a way of living and that a life of dignity is enjoyed by everyone. We are fortunate to have such an inspirational woman in the field to speak to us tonight. Please join me in welcoming Amy Domini.
Lindsey Parsons is a board member at the ICCR representing the Episcopal Church. Ms. Parsons is also a trustee at the Loring, Wolcott and Coolidge office.