Sustainable Finance & Socially Responsible Investment

Every spring, thousands of students don a cap and gown, accept their diplomas and walk into the next phase of their lives full of excitement. They’ve shed the weight of books, classes and papers, but they may still carry one thing – student loan debt.

Sustainability reporting has been a growing trend in China for at least a decade. To support seasoned and first-time reporters alike, GRI has launched the Simplified Chinese translation of the GRI Standards.

Since the first day that I started working in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the late 1980’s – under the wise tutelage of Reynold Levy, then president of the AT&T Foundation – I both learned and asserted that the purpose of any good corporate philanthropy or CSR program was to find the intersection between societal needs and the business interests of the company and to create real impact for both -- paying attention to a company’s various stakeholders and conducting your business in a responsible manner with an eye on the long-term value for business and society.

KeyBank Community Development Lending & Investment (CDLI) has provided $43 million in construction financing to BRIDGE Housing Corporation (BRIDGE) for the development of 203 affordable housing units in the RiverPlace neighborhood of Portland, OR. The affordable housing project is the culmination of a competitive request for proposal process initiated jointly by the Portland Housing Bureau and Prosper Portland. National Equity Fund, Inc. is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit limited partner of RiverPlace Housing 3 Limited Partnership (LP).

Sustainability, one of our company values, means we are focused on the long-term health of our business, planet and communities. Our efforts over the last few years have dramatically raised the bar, and recently resulted in our ranking #72 on Barron’s first list of 100 Most Sustainable Companies. Barron’s is a US-based publication that covers the financial and investment industries. It's 100 Most Sustainable Companies list was developed with Calvert Research and Management, which looked at the 1,000 largest publicly held companies headquartered in the US (size determined by market value) as of December 31, 2017.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece entitled, “Corporations Will Inherit the Earth,” Frank Bruni muses about the role of corporations in society at a time that the federal government is -- to use his phrase -- “a bumbling klutz.” Bruni asserts, “It can’t manage health care. It can’t master infrastructure. It can’t fund itself for more than tiny increments of time. It can barely stay open.” In contrast, he says, America’s corporations are operating “with an innovation and can-do ambition solely absent in Washington.”

The Responsible Business Summit New York (March 26-27) is the leading conference to create long-term, positive impact on society, the environment and industry through transforming business operations.

See who you could be altering the course of your business and collaborating with.

Each year, the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit brings together industry leaders to talk about sustainable business and finance. This year, TD's Chief Environment Officer, Karen Clarke-Whistler, participated as a panelist and her perspective was included in the TD-Bloomberg Sustainability Dialogues – a report that captures the insights and learnings from the conference.

Climate change, the low-carbon transition and sustainable development pose some of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. The global transition is well underway and has urgent and wide-ranging implications for companies, policymakers and investors. This requires integrated thinking across the board from corporates - but do workplace pensions schemes and business strategies sufficiently reflect this?

I am loving my life as an entrepreneur and enjoy explaining to clients exactly what it is that I do and how I can help them understand their finances. I have worked to create tailored services that are affordable, but fit my client’s needs. From my own personal experience and working with clients, I have discovered the following tips that every millennial should know...