Highlights from Heartland’s Sustainable Finance Hub Deep Dive

The mission of this meeting was to mobilize a new wave of sustainable finance opportunities in the four-state (Western Pennsylvania, Southern Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky) Industrial/Appalachian region in alignment with the ReImagine Appalachia’s policy blueprint and the Marshall Plan for Middle America. Building on Heartland’s 2019 Steel Cities Capital Roundtable, we assembled sustainable investment and responsible contractor policies, models, and practices for this region, long impacted by boom-bust deindustrialization, resource depletion, and high levels of poverty, both rural and urban.

The Heartland Network originally proposed the Sustainable Investment Hub to foster workers’ capital partnerships among cities, pension funds, and the private sector to reinvest in communities left behind. “Sustainable investment” generally refers to the process of taking due account of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in investment decision-making, leading to increased investments in longer-term and sustainable investments. Locally-targeted ESG investments are sometimes called economically-targeted investments (ETIs).

To emphasize a circular economy systems approach, we have worked to build a five-legged table with the drivers of economic and sustainable development, including cities and regional institutions; developers, contractors; manufacturers and suppliers; unions and worker-directed transition groups; and sustainable finance entities (pensions, responsible fund managers, etc.).

The Hub concept aims to facilitate the exchange of best practices, encourage self-organized investment standards, and foster city, state, and national ESG and ETI policy implementation models. The most practical outcome is to establish a clearinghouse for clean economy manufacturing, energy, transportation, and affordable housing projects. Heartland’s Partners will engage with pension funds, the labor movement, state treasurers, environmental and other stakeholders to implement these components.

See this week’s Expresso for some highlights from the event and where we plan to go from here.