The Oak Park-River Forest Community Foundation has announced a new investment partnership with Bivium Westfuller to help address systemic racial inequities.
The new, outsourced chief investment officer will begin to manage the foundation’s $35 million investment portfolio June 1. An OCIO handles investment needs with expertise without being in-house, according to a statement from the foundation. The firm will work with senior leadership to ensure the foundation’s investment goals are in line with its mission.
The foundation’s mission is to “unite community members to mobilize resources to advance a racially just society and equitable outcomes of Oak Park, River Forest and surrounding communities.”
The foundation, founded in 1959, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides grant opportunities, bolsters philanthropic efforts and manages access to scholarships. It’s a public charity, said Tony Martinez, Jr., the president and chief executive officer of the foundation.
An example of the foundation’s work is in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Martinez said. During that time, the foundation was able to motivate donors to contribute to the rapid response and recovery fund, which in turn provided nonprofits and other organizations the dollars they needed to supply services to the community. Donors also benefitted by getting a tax credit.
“The investments made by BWF on behalf of the Foundation will encourage publicly traded companies to end practices that harm communities of color and adopt practices that promote racial justice through shareholder pressure,” according to a news release.
Bivium Westfuller will invest in things such as companies, stocks or organizations that support racial equity work and are looking to end practices that harm communities of color, Martinez said. Ways they could determine this are by having companies disclose the racial makeup of their staff or having a racial equity audit.
“Knowing that our communities are diverse in every facet, we wanted to make sure that everything we do, that we use a racial justice and equity lens,” Martinez said. “So that way, we can start making some really deep changes.”
According to the announcement, the foundation needs to address racial disparities for community members to prosper. To reach this goal, the foundation decided to partner with Bivium Westfuller, a Black-owned and -led financial services firm.
““Bivium Westfuller shares our values and our commitment to grow our charitable dollars by investing through a 100-percent racial justice and equity lens,” Martinez said in a news release.
The spark for this change was to ensure every facet of the foundation was operating in a way that promotes racial justice, Martinez said, and Bivium Westfuller has experience in investing charitable dollars in a way that reflects the foundation’s mission.
“We want our investments to be structured in a way that displays best practices in the field in terms of sustainability, in terms of responsible investing with special interest given to racial equity and justice,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that we walk the walk, so to speak.”
Bivium Capital has been managing investors for 22 years and Westfuller is one of the biggest Black-, woman- and LGBTQ-owned wealth management and investment advisory firms in the United States, according to the news release.
“By investing consciously with a racial equity lens, we are building wealth within communities of color, and therefore hopefully preventing the very symptoms of poverty and injustice that we address with our grantmaking,” Martinez said in the release.
The firm has experience leading philanthropic institutions, according to the announcement, including the New York Foundation.
Bivium Westfuller was chosen after a request for proposals and vetting process.
“We look forward to working in collaboration with the Foundation to deploy resources that advance equitable outcomes for residents within its communities,” said Ian Fuller, the chief executive officer of Westfuller and co-head of Bivium Westfuller.