By Tom Croft, Executive Director for the SVA
Heartland Capital Strategies, an innovative policy initiative of the SVA, has launched a series of Responsible Investment (RI) Forums. 
Aiming to educate the capital stewards of pension and institutional investment funds, the forums are being held to examine opportunities to invest in good jobs and the clean economy and to revitalize industrial communities, The forums are a collaboration between Heartland Capital Strategies (HCS) and Blue/Green Alliance (BGA), a coalition of green businesses, unions and environmental groups and are running concurrent with four regional conferences planned by the BGA in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Detroit.
The RI forums in Atlanta, LA and Philly were big successes. The Atlanta forum featured the Atlanta Mayor and Ted Turner’s son-in-law, who are driving a major retrofit project for downtown Atlanta. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed led a presentation on his city's initiative to retrofit a wide range of commercial, public and residential buildings in a 400-block area of downtown that proved the highlight of a gathering of investors, pension fund managers, business, labor and community leaders.
The LA forum featured Phil Angelides, former Chair of the Financial Crisis Investigation Committee and former Treasurer, State of California. Angelides expressed his continuing disgust with how Wall Street has become “a casino floor as big as New York, New York,” after wiping away $9 trillion of household wealth “like a day trade gone bad.” Angelides assailed the financial system centered on Wall Street for “becoming a conduit for speculation rather than productive investment.” Citing Heartland Capital Strategies as “a clearinghouse for what’s good in investment,” Angelides asserted that four years after the market collapse “the financial crisis is still metastasizing.” He also presented a superb panel focused on clean energy and clean tech investments.
In Philadelphia, the forum featured a special deep dive conversation about investment opportunities and capital gap challenges in rebuilding sustainable cities. The event highlighted the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust's (HIT) unique investment in Paseo Verde, a LEED-certified multi-family and affordable housing project in a distressed neighborhood near Temple University, also featuring commercial and transit-oriented development). The forum also focus on the Philadelphia Energy Innovation Cluster Project, a federally-funded "collaboratory" that is researching applied techniques in retrofitting buildings in Philadelphia. The project has implications for sustainable infrastructure and energy efficiency, and clean energy. 
The last forum will take place in the Motor City-Detroit on May 9, and will focus on rebuilding, sustainably, American industry, with an emphasis on efficient transportation manufacturing.
HCS has been blogging on these forums on its redesigned Heartland website (www.heartlandnetwork.org). The Project, with the help of Marco Trbovich and TriCom Associates, received widespread notice for these events in blogs posted in Huffington Post, Campaign for America’s Future, the AFL-CIO and USW Blogs. For more information on RI, please visit www.heartlandnetwork.org.
