A Letter of Introduction From The Portfolio Managers

At Brown Advisory, we are deeply committed to sustainable investing. We firmly believe that there does not have to be a trade-off between strong performance and smart investments that help address society’s trickiest sustainability challenges.

For a number of our sustainable investment strategies, we issue formal reports each year to keep clients informed about how those strategies are generating positive impact. Enclosed is our Impact Report for the Brown Advisory Large-Cap Sustainable Growth strategy.

The report includes a review of our environmental, social and governance (ESG) research and integration approach, and examines how we use the concept of Sustainable Business Advantage (SBA) to identify compelling long-term investments. We also discuss the positive environmental and social outcomes being created by our portfolio companies, and report on our engagement and proxy voting activity during the year (both as an individual stakeholder and in concert with investor coalitions).

We are pleased to report continued progress and advancement of our sustainable investment initiatives at the firm, particularly our work to develop new investment strategies for our clients. We launched several new strategies in the past few years. Within equities, we launched our Sustainable International Leaders strategy using the same philosophy as our Global Leaders strategy while investing exclusively outside the U.S. We also launched the Sustainable Income strategy, emphasizing dividend income, and our new Social Inclusion strategy, which emphasizes companies with strong diversity, equity and inclusion profiles. Finally, we continued to build on the progress we’ve made with our three-year-old Sustainable Small-Cap Core strategy. In fixed income, we launched our first global bond strategy, the Global Sustainable Total Return Bond strategy, and built it from the ground up as a sustainable solution for clients.

Further, we have continued to build our team and expertise internally, adding several new ESG research analysts while also continuing to push the envelope as far as integrating fundamental and ESG analysis in our investment process.

We thank our ESG research team for its contribution to this report and our work in general. The team works tirelessly to ensure that our investment decisions are informed by solid ESG data and clear insights about how that data may affect a company’s prospects. We also thank our fundamental equity research colleagues, and all of our colleagues across the firm, for embracing sustainable investing principles so enthusiastically.

Most importantly, we are deeply grateful to our clients, who trust us as stewards of their capital and serve as our partners as we learn, innovate and improve over time. We believe we have served our clients well over the past 12 years, but there is always more to learn. We hope you find this year’s report informative, and we welcome a continuing conversation with you about our work and continuing evolution as investors.

Sincerely,

 

Karina Funk, CFA
Portfolio Manager 
 

David Powell, CFA
Portfolio Manager
 

 

 

 

 

*Brown Advisory entities included are: Brown Advisory LLC, Brown Investment Advisory & Trust Company, Brown Advisory Ltd., and Brown Advisory Trust Company of Delaware, LLC.