AEGN

The Rockefeller's divest in oil

25 May 2020

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Impact investing: The Rockefellers are getting out of oil.

Written by Sue Mathews, The Mullum Trust

How huge the headlines were in 2014 when Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced that momentous decision.

Five years since shedding fossil fuel investments, their investment performance has beaten market benchmarks.

Stephen Heintz, President of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (itself an AEGN member), outlined the challenging journey that the Fund’s trustees took to make the decision to get out of fossil fuel investments at a 2016 Divest Invest conference organised by a group of AEGN members.

A more sustainable world

Last week the Rockefeller Brothers Fund released a case study of its success in the five years since that momentous decision. It is an impressively readable, clear and honest account.

At the core of their decision was the challenge of maintaining returns while avoiding companies that worked against the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s mission: “to create a more sustainable world”.

Stephen eloquently captures the issue many of us have grappled with:

“What I did not accept was the premise that careful stewardship of our endowment required that we insulate management of the portfolio from the broad mission of the organisation as a whole. I didn’t see why our goals—the overarching purpose of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund — should only be visible to and achieved by people working on one side of the firewall (between grantmaking and investing).”

Watch Stephen’s interview

Now, with five plus years’ divestment experience, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has changed the question from “Isn’t it too risky to divest?” to “Isn’t it too risky not to divest?”

At the time of the 2014 announcement, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund was one of 67 foundations with combined assets totalling $4.2 billion who had signed up to DivestInvest Philanthropy (AEGN members will remember DI Philanthropy founder Ellen Dorsey’s keynote address at the AEGN’s conference in 2018). The Rockefeller Brothers Fund decision provided powerful leadership in this movement: The case study now celebrates organisations and individuals representing now more than $12 trillion in total assets who have committed to divest from fossil fuels or to invest in climate solutions.

There is much to learn from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund experience, I encourage you to read their case study.

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