Threshold Group, a registered investment advisor, has launched a unique platform focused on regional economic development in the Pacific Northwest.
This investment platform, called Invest NW, has been designed to build capacity and demand for impact investments targeting positive economic and social outcomes in the region.
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The Invest NW objective is to source and evaluate investment strategies across a broad spectrum of social and environmental outcomes, including health care, education, diversity, energy, water and waste management, housing, financial services, and mitigation of the impacts of climate change.
Investing in people and place
"Families value their heritage and its relationship to their community and regional roots," explains Ed Lazar, president of Threshold Group.
"We see a rising trend that multiple generations want their investments to produce innovation and betterment close to home. Invest NW is intended to enable them to do so in a manner and structure similar to the rest of their portfolio investments."
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By GlobalData"For those investors who are formulating a personal vision of an improved world, investing solely in stocks and bonds, domestic or international, can miss nearby opportunities," he continues.
"A key purpose is to promote economic development and job creation in the Pacific Northwest," Lazar says. "Think ‘proactively transformative’ more than ‘socially responsible,’ building upon the inherent value of investing in people and place."
Threshold Group was founded and is owned by the Russell family, which created the global investment services firm known today as Russell Investments. While most often recognized for its stock indices, Russell Investments’ core competency was built through decades of excellence in the evaluation of investment managers.
Threshold Group’s Investment Management & Research team honors George Russell’s legacy of high quality due diligence, and created for the Invest NW platform a methodology that weights and scores various impact outcomes, and evaluates them relative to an investment’s financial and operational considerations.
"Our tools and methods are designed to maintain the quality and integrity of the research process and apply them to both the financial and the impact return on investment. Our objective is to align these criteria with the unique goals of each of our impact-focused clients," says Teresa Wells, director of investment strategy. "That is what we believe sets us apart in this space."
The majority of opportunities are in venture capital and private equity. Additionally, most impact investment strategies are considered "emerging," lacking the operational infrastructure to hold up against a traditional institutional due diligence process and therefore are not yet followed by investment analysts.
"Our challenge has been to approach every opportunity with openness and creativity," Wells says, "to identify and recommend pathways, for the purpose of marrying investor demand with quality solutions in the impact investing arena.
"An added benefit to the regional economy is that our commitments have the potential to attract even more institutional capital, thereby strengthening the entire economic and social ecosystem."
Threshold Group has evaluated mission-related investments for foundations and high-net-worth individuals since 2010. The firm currently works with clients controlling approximately $1bn who have set the objective of aligning their portfolios with their missions.
