"If you can both make smart investment decisions and support a cause you value at the same time, that seems a no-brainer."
So says Laura Ewbank, an attorney and assistant general counsel at Microsoft, of her decision to invest 100% of her Giving Account into Fidelity Charitable's impact investing pools in 2021.
Ewbank, who says she's "trying to be more sophisticated in how I invest," was spurred to do so after learning about impact investing from a financial advisor, per a press release.
Fidelity Charitable, an independent nonprofit and the nation's largest grantmaker, says its assets allocated to impact investments rose from $2 billion in 2020 to $3 billion in 2021�a 67% increase, per Fortune.
The trend isn't limited to impact investing, which Fidelity Charitable defines as "using one's investment choices to help achieve social benefits while also generating financial returns."
Two-thirds of Millennials (61%) say impact investing has greater potential than traditional forms of philanthropy to create long-term positive change, and 62% believe it has greater potential than traditional forms of philanthropy to create long-term positive change, per the press release.
Fidelity Charitable also found that 41% of current participants plan to increase their amount of impact investing, and almost none expect to decrease their giving.
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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.