Meeting Details - Golden Gate University (Room 6208)

Wednesday, January 22, 2020
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm 

Title:
Thinking Outside of the Box When It Comes to Impact Investing

Speaker(s):
Marco Vangelisti, Founder Essential Knowledge for Transition

Program Description:

There have been a flurry of increasingly dire reports in recent years about the climate crisis and its likely causes and impacts. Investors express rising interest in sustainable investments. Even the Federal Reserve has begun to incorporate climate risk into its assessment of the financial system. Yet the investment industry continues to predict future market returns based largely on historical returns. Generating market returns is predicated on continuing the behaviors which have led to the climate crisis in the first place, such as treating our planet’s natural resources as unpriced commodities available in support of the continuous growth that is a hallmark of our capitalist system. How do we reconcile this apparent cognitive dissonance between climate change and a desire for more eco-friendly investments on one hand with an industry to continues to use the past to predict the future? Marco Vangelisti is an expert in sustainable and impact investing and a founder of the Slow Money movement, but had a successful career in institutional investing before he had a personal epiphany that his investments were contributing to climate destruction. He’ll share his assessment of the systems and beliefs that have contributed to our current climate crisis and how we can help our concerned clients invest their capital in ways that are less harmful to the planet and more aligned with their values.

Speaker(s): 

Marco Vangelisti, Founder Essential Knowledge for Transition

Marco is a 100% impact investor with a longstanding commitment to direct local investments. He is a founding member of Slow Money and has been on the leadership team of the Slow Money Northern California Network since 2009. Prior to his shift in focus towards local and sustainable ventures he spent 20 years in the finance industry, where he managed investment equity portfolios on behalf of large foundations and endowments, developed statistical risk models for equity and fixed income markets around the world, and taught portfolio management, asset allocation, and performance and risk analysis at the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Institute of SF.

A Fulbright scholar in Mathematics and Economics at the University of California in Berkeley, an MBA at the Milan-based “Enrico Mattei” school in his native Italy, and a Master of Fine Arts at the intersection of public art and ecology, Marco’s cross-disciplinary, integrative approach to solving complex problems provided the foundation for developing Essential Knowledge for Transition. From his experience as a visual artist to his studies of permaculture design to his role as core advisor for Ecocity Builders, Marco’s reputation as a guest lecturer and author is rooted in whole systems thinking and his ability to make complex concepts accessible to the general public. He is dedicated to democratizing financial literacy and sustainable investing.

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