Earth911 Podcast: Doug Heske on Choosing Stocks to Encourage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Newday Impact Investing CEO Doug Heske returns to talk about investing to create a sustainable, circular, and equitable economy that we can hand to our children and grandchildren with a sense of pride. This week we’re looking at diversity, equity, and inclusion (often shortened to “DEI”), the idea that the dignity and value of every person must underlie a just society. Doug’s team at Newday Impact has developed methodologies to identify companies that are making genuine progress on DEI issues, as well as screen out companies that, similar to greenwashing, “socialwash” their actual diversity and inclusion performance, and that can make them a long-term risk as an investment.

Investors are increasingly factoring assessments of a company’s DEI performance into their decisions. They recognize that hidden debts, whether that’s the loss of economic value from excluding large swaths of the population from full participation in the economy or the latent cost of environmental damage, add up to consequences that can kill not only a company but a market or the planet. We discuss several companies with exceptional DEI characteristics, Lowe’s Companies (NYSE: LOW), Apple (NASDAQ: APPL), Walgreens Boots Alliance (NASDAQ: WBA), Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), and a stock we touched on last time we talked, Target (NYSE: TGT). You can learn more about Newday Impact Investing at newdayimpact.com.