World Education Services (WES), a global social enterprise, began its mission-aligned investing journey in 2020 with responsible and sustainable investing and a 4% carveout for catalytic, impact-first investing. Three years later, the nonprofit organization’s board of directors approved a bold new impact investing mandate to align 100% of WES assets with its mission and values by 2030.
It was a decision informed by three years of reimagining what stewardship and fiduciary duty mean for the mission-driven organization that supports the educational, economic, and social inclusion of immigrants, refugees, and international students in the U.S. and Canada. WES management and board members were driven by a desire to test new investment strategies and explore approaches to align more of its growing resources with impact.
Their journey to commit to 100% mission-aligned investing is the focus of a new Money + Meaning podcast from a SOCAP24 discussion. The podcast discussion features WES leaders and board members who highlight lessons learned, milestones, and how the decision aims to reinforce the organization’s approach to impact:
- Esther Benjamin, WES CEO and Executive Director
- Margot Brandenburg, Ford Foundation, Executive Member of WES Investment Committee
- Sidney Hargro, The LeadersTrust, Vice Chair of the WES Board
- Smitha Das, WES Senior Director of Investments
Benjamin said the organization’s roots as a social impact enterprise prompted it to consider other forms of impact about a decade ago and launch the WES Mariam Assefa Fund for philanthropic initiatives, which include grant-making and impact investing. Since then, WES revenue has reached about $100 million annually, and the nonprofit realized it had a growing opportunity to make a difference beyond its services.
“Our mission is to ensure that international students and immigrants and refugees should be able to succeed anywhere in the world,” she said. “The annual revenue that we generate allows us to be financially independent in a way that is so powerful. … We see these resources as belonging to our community, and we see these resources as being regenerative for our community.”
Das said regeneration and long-term impact provided the motivation for the decision to re-examine how WES could deepen the impact of its finances. “What we’ve been looking at across the team is how do we build the right foundation for this work so it is enduring beyond any of us at WES for the next 50 years,” she said. “That involves governance, people, internal and external processes, and technology to move our capital in a thoughtful way to get to that 2030 goal.”
The commitment to moving 100% of capital to be mission-aligned by 2030 is ingrained in the WES investment policy statement. “Through a very rigorous and thoughtful journey, we’ve been able to move with a sense of urgency to allocate more of our capital along with our values and mission, and that led again to this commitment to 100%,” Das said.
As one of the board members involved in that journey, Hargro said a combination of factors sparked the work to reimagine WES’s responsibility. These include the board’s culture and composition: leaders in higher education, corporate and social innovation, and lived experience as immigrants or children of immigrants — the people WES serves.
Hargro said it is also a group willing to experiment while using evidence of what was working from the Mariam Assafa Fund to ensure its investments were supporting the organization’s goal. “It offers us an opportunity to actually learn by doing, learn by experimentation, which I think is critically important for transformative impact,” he said.
The board also was willing to re-examine what it saw as a risk, he said. “The idea of risk evolved from being purely a financial conversation to this conversation about what is the risk of not maximizing these funds? What is the risk of not creating absolute maximum opportunity for the immigrants, refugees, and students that we seek to support?”
Those are the types of broader questions Brandenburg encourages philanthropic organizations to ask as they consider new and more impactful ways of moving their assets to better align with their mission and vision. “Different organizations have different opportunities and constraints,” she said. “They can consider that diagnosis of ‘Who am I as an institution? What can I do? What do I need to be cognizant of?’”
By determining existing capabilities and what external assistance is needed, organizations can identify the next, most meaningful step, Brandenburg said, adding that the WES journey provides an example of progress and growth. “It expands what’s possible,” she said. “It allows other organizations … to take a meaningful step forward.”
Learn more in the full conversation:
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