Commonfund's Third Annual Invitational Diverse Manager Day

From February 9th-11th, Commonfund held its third Diverse Manager Day event, with 20 managers identified through its Diverse Manager Portal and other sources. These diverse managers¹ cover a broad range of asset classes, including equities (5), hedge funds (3), private equity (3), venture capital (3), private credit (3) and real estate (3), and fixed income (1) for a total of 20 managers.

This annual event is an important marker of Commonfund’s commitment to work with partners across the industry who share the firm’s dedication to sourcing, evaluating, and allocating to diverse managers. 

The managers who joined Diverse Manager Day were selected following a comprehensive review of each submission to Commonfund’s Diverse Manager Portal made over the course of 2020 and 2021, for which further conversation was deemed worthwhile. During the event, managers participated in virtual presentations to investment teams representing Commonfund’s Outsourced CIO business, Commonfund Asset Management, and its private capital practice, Commonfund Capital.  

For background, Commonfund launched the Diverse Manager Portal in 2019 to source and expand the firm’s reach to diverse managers within equities, fixed income, hedge funds, real estate and private credit strategies through the receipt and review of due diligence materials. In 2020, the Portal was re-opened permanently and continues to garner new submissions from historically underrepresented groups across a wide range of asset classes including private equity, venture capital and private real assets and sustainability. 

In 2021, Commonfund achieved the following milestones related to its Diverse Manager Portal: 

• We received a total of 58 submissions from 48 different investment firms. While this was a lower influx of managers to the Portal compared to that of last year (86), we continue to see steady engagement with this base and already this year, as conferences activity has resumed, we have seen an increased rate of submissions relative to last year.
• With these additions, the Diverse Manager Database now includes more than 280 managers.
• In addition, Commonfund had over 245 meetings with 146 different diverse managers in 2021, leading to an additional rich source of talent from which to draw for the Diverse Manager Day.
• In 2021 Commonfund added an additional 13 diverse managers to it’s diverse manager investment roster.

The recent group of submissions and manager meetings spanned eight eligible asset classes. The following chart provides a breakdown of the diversity of participating managers:

Since 2017, Commonfund has been incorporating a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) supplement to the due diligence process for each new manager under evaluation by its investment teams, which is consistent with the evolving industry DEI standards. We recently enhanced the due diligence supplement and implemented other new measures in support of Commonfund’s goals for its “Diversity 2.0” program – a process aimed at gathering and analyzing industry DEI data for the purposes of increasing manager transparency.

1. Commonfund diverse managers are generally defined as investment firms with 33 percent or more diverse ownership. Diverse managers include: women, African American/Black, Asian, LatinX, people of indigenous descent, and veterans and/or people with disabilities. This definition applies to managers with whom Commonfund has an active investment.