By Douglas Bitonti Stewart and David Warrington
As members of the Jewish Funders Network (JFN), we were excited to witness the launch of the Safety Respect Equity (SRE) coalition to ensure Jewish workplaces reflected the highest ethical and procedural standards to prevent sexual harassment and the abuse of inequitable power dynamics.
Before signing the commitment and attesting we would meet the standards, we went through the necessary and hard work of updating our internal policies and refreshing our staff training regarding accountability, reporting, and leadership. As we prepared to take the next step, sharing the commitment with our grant partners, we decided to take another path.
Before asking our grant partners (whom we call for-impact organizations as no one should be defined by what they are not) where they were in relation to the standards, we turned to our friends on Wall Street (our for-profit colleagues).
In alignment with our longstanding commitment to impact and value-based investing, we decided that anything we would ask our for-impact partners to do we should assuredly ask our investment partners to step up to do as well. Given the risks associated with behavior that prompted the #MeToo movement in the first place came from our sister sector, holding our investment managers to task makes good sense.
