WE ARE EXPERIENCED INVESTMENT ADVISORS TO ENDOWMENTS AND FOUNDATIONS
We leverage decades of experience managing investments for a wide range of institutions to help our endowment and foundation clients.
Since our founding, we have served as an investment manager for endowments and foundations; as of Dec. 31, 2017, we managed approximately $6 billion in assets for our nonprofit clients.*
We seek to help nonprofits shoulder their fiduciary burden. To do so, we serve clients in a number of ways, from fully discretionary relationships to situations where we act in a more consultative role. We partner with clients to help them navigate the challenges of complex capital markets, and help them develop investment policies that seek to address the intersecting concerns of the board and other stakeholders.
We are of one mind with our clients regarding nonprofit service and the challenges that nonprofits face. We seek out colleagues who feel a natural call to serve, and our people serve on the boards and investment committees of hundreds of nonprofits around the world. We believe this perspective helps us to build deep partnerships with our nonprofit clients.
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Please submit the form to begin a conversation about how Brown Advisory might advise you on the next step in your investment journey.
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WE FOCUS ON STRATEGIC ADVICE TO HELP NONPROFITS PURSUE AMBITIOUS GOALS
We use the term strategic advice to describe our role in helping our clients solve their most pressing organizational challenges. Our aim is to provide holistic advice to clients, so we can broadly help them advance their nonprofit missions. We counsel our clients on many issues outside of traditional portfolio management, and work with them on topics ranging from municipal advisory services to charitable program development.
Our client teams partner with our in-house Strategic Advisory Group, to pinpoint each of our clients’ specific challenges and to develop customized solutions and action plans to address those challenges. In recent years, we have helped clients address a broad range of issues, including:
- Advice on governance
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Guidance on legal compliance, including:
• Advice on fiduciary duties and responsibilities
• Noninvestment risk management
- Tax compliance and tax reporting
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Philanthropic advisory services, including advice on:
• Complex grant making
• Fundraising and donor engagement
• Acceptance of illiquid gifts
• Planned giving
- Matters related to land acquisition opportunities
- Mission-related and impact investing
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IMPACT INVESTING: HELPING NONPROFITS ALIGN THEIR MISSIONS AND INVESTMENTS
For many years, we have worked with endowments and foundations to help them explore impact investment options and broadly pursue mission-related investment goals.
Traditionally, most nonprofits invested purely for financial results, then spent or granted funds each year to advance the organizational mission. Today, many nonprofits want greater synergy between their missions and their investments. They want to use a larger percentage of their invested capital to generate positive, mission-related impact.
Nonprofits each approach the question of sustainable investing from a different perspective, and with different priorities. Our goal is simply to help endowments and foundations clarify their objectives, then implement the right solutions. Thanks to recent regulatory guidance, nonprofits have improved clarity today about sustainable investing within a fiduciary context; in the case of private foundations, some of these options may satisfy their annual spending requirements.
We believe that a thoughtful, sustainable investment approach can in fact bridge the gap between investment goals and mission objectives, within a unified portfolio strategy.
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We partner with a variety of foundations, endowments and other nonprofits around the world. As a fiduciary, we can advise an organization on the entirety of its investment portfolio or on specific components of that portfolio. Our colleagues personally serve as board members and in other roles for more than 400 nonprofits, giving us an understanding of the investment and governance challenges these organizations face.