Fiduciaries for the Future
A new professional group launching Feb. 10, 2022
As the Bank of Nature design initiative has cooked, it has become very clear that we have heroes among us who don't know they are heroes.
That's what's behind our exploration of fiduciaries -- people who run existing pensions and endowments and trusts and who have constituted obligations to ideas like stewardship. The colossal "however" is that they don't have a way to exercise that stewardship because they are "trapped" in a traditional, speculative corporate finance world (like Wall Street) of short term gains, share movement, quarterly reporting and corporate capture.
Now, they have a professional outlet to consider how they presently shape the world and future and how they might better shape the world and future.
Fiduciaries for the Future, the new professional group, hosts its founding meeting Feb. 10, 2022. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/225452312937. It’s free, on Zoom and 90 minutes.
What is stewardship?
Does fiduciary duty extend to future generations?
How does fiduciary finance work to engage vast funds for climate security and other overlapping global pandemics?
Pensions, as one category of fiduciary money, are indefinite if not forever.
Think of it this way: Every day, someone with a pension turns 65 and can start to collect the benefits of a promised, dignified retirement. Everyday, the rolls of beneficiaries change with people entering the benefits phase or, uh, leaving it. Everyday, a 20-something gets a job for which they are promised a pension in 30 years, or so. Therefore, everyday, a pension is reminded that its horizon is (at least) 30 years in the future. That puts that pension into 2050 when the climate is either wrangled or run amok. Pensions of 2022 are actively working against a safe climate future by delegating their influence to market makers, asset managers and other consultants who invest those funds in speculative, extractive, polluting and climate-dimming investments (like fossil fuels).
The fiduciaries who recognize that they are not fulfilling an obligation to the future need a new channel to exercise their values and still achieve value for the ongoing health of the funds that are supposed to live on indefinitely. At Bank of Nature, we call that better, safer channel Fiduciary Finance, a new idea and a right-sized strategy for fiduciaries to be "heroes of climate change."
It’s a way out of the trap that reclaims decision-making based on stewardship, catalyzes at-scale enterprises that meet climate and justice thresholds, detoxifies societal externalities and continues to meet financial minimums. Forever.
Are you a fiduciary? Take a look at Bank of Nature’s open letter to you and our preliminary design offering on what is Fiduciary Finance. Join us Feb. 10, 2022. Find us on LinkedIn.
Fiduciaries for the Future is an initiative to identify fiduciaries of trillion-dollar assets who struggle with the betrayal of corporate finance to provide safety for their future beneficiaries living in a climate-changed world because of present-day investment decisions.