Putting Our Money Where Our Mission Is:
How CCF's Endowment is Increasing Our Impact
The California Community Foundation (CCF) is more than a grantmaker—we are an investor, and our investments have the power to support transformational social change. As part of our 2025-2035 Strategic Framework process, we are aligning our investments to both grow steadily and reflect our mission to make a good life accessible to all.
- Align more of our Endowment Pool investments with our mission across every type of asset we hold, while maintaining market-rate returns.
- Step back from investments that conflict with CCF’s values without sacrificing long-term returns.
- Prioritize investment opportunities that will specifically benefit communities and projects within Los Angeles County.
- Build in flexibility, allowing us to adjust as industry practices evolve and opportunities emerge.
- Meeting Basic Needs
- Building Economic Opportunity
- Creating Safe, Resilient, and Connected Communities
- Ensuring Communities Have a Voice
- Supporting Healing and Renewal
These priorities will guide how we put our values into practice, helping us identify whether an investment supports a good life for all or makes that vision harder to achieve.
Read more about these priorities in our 2025–2035 Strategic Framework.
CCF is far from the first foundation to put its endowment to work this way. Mission-aligned investing has become an established practice among foundations nationwide, with a growing body of evidence that capital can be deployed toward both competitive returns and measurable community outcomes.
We’ve drawn on that field-wide experience in designing our own strategy, including a commitment to direct a meaningful share of our endowment toward investments that directly benefit Los Angeles County.
Investments might connect to our mission in a wide variety of ways, so we sort them into categories to help guide our decisions. The strongest matches fall into three groups:
- Targeted Impact: Investments chosen specifically because they advance one or more of our five priorities.
- Broad Impact: Investments working toward positive environmental or social outcomes through business practices, products, services, or shareholder engagement.
- Aligned: Investments that factor in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations while avoiding activities inconsistent with CCF’s values.
CCF hires investment firms to make strategic investments on our behalf. Working with our investment partner, Cambridge Associates, we factor ownership and leadership diversity into how those firms are selected, alongside their track record and expertise.
We track how many of the firms we work with are:
- Significantly diverse: at least 33% owned or led by women or people of color (POC).
- Majority diverse: at least 50% owned or led by women or POC.
- Majority POC-led: at least 50% owned or led by POC specifically.
Here are two of the investment managers we’ve selected to help put our principles to work:
- BUILDING ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY: AVANTE CAPITAL PARTNERS
Avante Capital Partners is a Los-Angeles-based, majority women- and minority-owned firm providing flexible capital to lower middle market businesses, critical drivers of job creation and community economic growth.
Since 2009, Avante has grown to $1.5B+ assets under management, with more than 150 deals completed and zero cash loan losses. Over 65% of those deals came from relationships with women and diverse organizations.
- CREATING SAFE, RESILIENT, AND CONNECTED COMMUNITIES: ETHIC
Ethic is a technology platform that builds values-aligned public equities portfolios and uses shareholder engagement to encourage responsible business practices and long-term community impact.
Ethic manages more than $9B in assets and has helped reduce client portfolios’ carbon footprint by over 400,000 metric tons.