During the summer of 1988 Paul Freundlich and Alisa Gravitz met Ed Winslow at a conference and agreed upon a strategic partnership to provide Socially Responsible Investment services to the Co-op America (now Green America) members.
Several things were immediately apparent. We wouldn’t be able to support a nationwide nonprofit with 30,000 members with our small staff of eight people in Colorado Springs. We had to create a brand that created a national identity and a shared vision and mission. We had to identify and recruit advisors around the country who had an understanding of, and proficiency in, SRI and attract them to join our firm.
In 1988, the Social Investment Forum was about five years old. There were two other firms in the country, in Portland and Oakland, that openly specialized in SRI, along with a few brokerage branch offices and money managers. Individual client-facing advisors working in the space tended to be working out of their home offices and were, at best, “tolerated” by their firms.
In our first year, focused on building and supporting a community of advisors who would specialize in socially responsible investing, we were able to bring in twenty-five advisors from around the country.
My first event with the Social Investment Forum, was in the summer of 1989, at the refurbished South Shore Country Club in Chicago. For some reason, I was invited to dinner with the key leaders of the industry; Jerry Dodson of Parnassus, Joan Shapiro of South Shore Bank, Peter Kinder and Amy Domini from KLD, Wayne Silby from Calvert, and Joan Bavaria from Trillium. I can assure you that I learned more about this industry from this one dinner than would have been possible in any other way, and I was able to share with them what we hoped to accomplish at First Affirmative.
In 1990, after we recruited 25 people from around the country, the regulatory body of the time published a requirement that we would have to see each advisor in our firm, face-to-face at least once a year. Since it made no sense to fly all over the country, we decided that our best option was to create an event so that people would come to us. So, in 1990, we had 45 people join us at a dude ranch in the mountains near Colorado Springs for “SRI in the Rockies,” a version of which we have produced and hosted every year except 2020 (COVID) and 2024 since, with a 2026 event now scheduled for November. We honor Steve Schueth’s pivotal role in organizing so many of these and Kathy Lewis’s role in administering each one of them.
In addition to hosting nearly 3,000 people at these conferences, First Affirmative has provided leadership in the sustainable, responsible and impact investment industry in many ways. Our executives served for many years on the Board of Directors of US SIF (the successor to the Social Investment Forum). First Affirmative was a founding signatory of the Valdez Principles, now known as CERES. First Affirmative was an early signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI). The company has been actively involved with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, the Carbon Disclosure Project, and the Intentional Endowments Network, among others.
In 2025, I was honored by Trillium Asset Management and US SIF with the Joan Bavaria Award, recognizing leadership in driving transformation in capital markets towards social and environmental impact.
In 2000, Kevin O’Keefe led the launch of the first managed mutual fund product using only SRI mutual funds. A few years later, we launched the first Unified Managed Account using all socially screened models on the Folio Financial platform. Most recently, Theresa Gusman, our current Chief Investment Officer, along with our friends at YourStake, led the release of our incredibly customizable Values Aligned Direct Index Solution.
For 38 years, First Affirmative has been privileged to work with an incredible group of employees and advisors, and to serve thousands of clients. During that time, nearly 300 advisors have entrusted client assets to us for management.
We treasure our relationship with so many wonderful people in the industry. Some, like our advisors Lincoln Pain, Laurie McClain, Richard Barr, Brian Laverty, David Dobkin, Charlotte Kania, Brenda Lenz and Tom Moser left us far too soon. Other great friends like Jan Bryan, Linda Jacobs, Ron Cohen, Georgette Frazier, Mel Miller and Charles Sandmel have entered retirement. And active advisors like Dwain Gump and Chris McHugh, Jim Horlacher, Harry Moran, Pam Brandt, Scott Buttfield and Jim Frazin have each been with us well over 25 years. Also, in the industry; Tim Smith, Mark Regier, Hal Brill, Michael Kramer, Justin Conway, Leslie Samuelrich and Erin Gray, Bob Helmuth, Anthony Eames, Jon Hale, Alisa Gravitz, Rebecca Adamson, Frank Coleman, Lisa Woll…The list goes on and on. We value each one of you more than you can imagine.
Our values can best be expressed by this passage from the West Point Cadet Prayer “Strengthen and increase our admiration for honest dealing and clean thinking, and suffer not our hatred of hypocrisy and pretense ever to diminish. Encourage us in our endeavor to live above the common level of life. Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and never to be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.”
In closing, as we turn the page on First Affirmative and it begins anew as Formative, we would share the following poem, by Frank Dempster Sherman:
