Whether you’re a trustee, investment committee member, or senior staff, you play a crucial role in stewarding long-term capital for your institution. But do you know how to develop and hone the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed in an increasingly complex investment environment? If you don’t have the answers yet, don’t worry—we’re here as a resource to guide you along the way, through the Investment Stewardship Academy educational offerings— a series of live and on-demand sessions designed for institutional investors.
Programming is now available on Commonfund Institute Online, a new learning management system. Click here to learn how you can access courses today!
Program content is geared towards trustees, investment committee members, and senior staff of qualified institutional investors, such as:
The curriculum for the Investment Stewardship Academy 2022 virtual programming is based on the six principles of investment stewardship (the 6 Ps) — purpose, policy, process, portfolio, people and perspective. Although institutions may define their missions in very different ways, all see a healthy endowment as essential to their long-term viability. The 6 Ps can therefore be applied across the nonprofit sector: to public or private colleges and universities; independent schools; private, family and community foundations; and nonprofit healthcare organizations, etc.
A critically important asset for many nonprofit organizations is their endowment, sometimes referred to by a different name such as long-term investment fund. So important is this pool of financial assets that for many institutions it is the difference between fulfilling their missions and being forced to lower their aspirations or even ceasing to operate.
The central document guiding the management of a nonprofit institution’s endowment—essentially, the strategic plan of the investment committee—is the investment policy statement (IPS). The IPS should be specific, embodying in concrete terms the best thinking of the board of trustees about the investment pool, its goals and its purposes; but it also needs to be sufficiently flexible to guide the board through environments that may be very different from those prevailing at the time of its adoption.
Fiduciary effectiveness is a matter of structure, processes and people, i.e., the governance structure of the organization, the processes within that structure and the people who inhabit that structure (the decision-makers). The key elements of structure are professionalism, the composition of the board, how engaged the board is and how transparent the organization is to its constituencies and beneficiaries—whomever has a stake in what the board is doing.
Constructing and overseeing an investment portfolio is at the heart of endowment management — the nucleus around which everything revolves. The investment portfolio is the core component to effective endowment management. If the strategic document behind the portfolio is the investment policy statement, the most fundamental tenet underpinning a wide range of decisions is asset allocation. Fundamentally, asset allocation is apportioning investment funds among categories of assets. Broadly, those categories are stocks, bonds, cash and real assets.
Fiduciary effectiveness is a matter of structure, processes and people, i.e., the governance structure of the organization, the processes within that structure and the people who inhabit that structure (the decision-makers). The key elements of structure are professionalism, the composition of the board, how engaged the board is and how transparent the organization is to its constituencies and beneficiaries—whomever has a stake in what the board is doing.
Just as endowments are perpetual in their time horizon, trustees should think strategically to position their institutions for the long term while remaining flexible and open to new ideas. The boards and investment committees of nonprofits have the opportunity to make meaningful contributions not only to their institutions but to society at large.
This course will examine the fundamentals for shepherding and growing the financial resources that enable nonprofit institutions to achieve their mission and objectives over the long term – the six principles of investment stewardship—purpose, policy, process, portfolio, people and perspective—also known as the six Ps.
These six core principles of effective endowment management will be dissected to show how institutions with a range of missions can maintain and grow a healthy endowment, as is essential to their long-term viability. The course will uncover how effective stewardship of the endowment is a discipline that is constantly evolving to support changing institutional needs, environmental factors and responses to developments in investment management.
Participants in this course will come away with an understanding of the six Ps and how they can use them in their own roles to effectively manage their endowment to achieve perpetuity of their institutions.
They will be able to:
Are you a fiduciary who oversees a long-term investment fund? Explore how the six Ps of investment stewardship are essential to your role as a fiduciary.
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