Conscious Choice: Susan Davis Networks a Mission in the Financial World

October 2001

Susan Davis Networks a Mission in the Financial World

by Bobbye Middendorf

"A lot of what is happening on Earth is being done as financial transactions that may not be the most socially responsible practices in the world. People need to get involved and invest around their values. They’ll get a better return and it will be better for the world."
— Susan Davis, Founder, Capital Missions Company

She is one of the most powerful women in finance, yet lives in a small town in Wisconsin and is thrilled to be growing her first organic vegetable garden. She has created networks among some of the nation’s wealthiest families, foundations, pension fund managers, socially conscious investors, and women business owners, yet she maintains a down-to-earth candor that resonates as completely genuine, authentic, concerned, and caring. She is brilliant at bringing people together — creating high level networks is her gift to the world — yet she has heretofore remained out of the limelight.

Over the past ten years, Susan Davis has set her sights on revising the financial industry’s theme song. She brings her gift of networking to the task of educating money managers about the win-win opportunities for socially responsible investing while giving them the tools and contacts to do the job. Wall Street sagely nods at the phrase "Capital controls," and goes about its business with the familiar motto, "A deal is good if it’s best for me." She is helping those with a lot of money to invest hear a different tune. "A deal is good when it’s good for all concerned," emphasized Davis more than once in our hour-long conversation.

So Who is Susan Davis?

Inspired by the contributions made by her entrepreneur father and volunteering mother, seeing how gratified they were by the work they pursued, Davis identified with, and sought to meld the best of both. After graduating from Brown University, she set to work combining service to society with the energy of the business world, working in for-profit companies that addressed social problems. Initially she worked in the media and publishing, helping start Boston’s Bay State Banner newspaper in 1965. She came to Chicago in 1968 to work with John Naisbitt at Urban Research Corporation, the first national urban affairs publishing company. She launched Urban Enterprise, a newsletter focusing on economic development in inner cities, and a similar publication, The Spokeswoman, covering economic development and other issues for women. As the ferment of early 1970s feminism took center stage, her researches indicated an opportunity to publish a national women’s weekly newsmagazine, focusing on women’s news collected from around the country. She and a group of eight women tried to raise the needed $2 million. The venture capitalists told Davis they didn’t fund women’s deals. After two frustrating years, Davis and her network of women movers and shakers conceded, and later turned the idea over to the Chicago Tribune. (WomanNews lives on, albeit in a watered down version.)

Davis’ turn towards finance came when she made a proposal to friends who were starting South Shore Bank, (now ShoreBank, the oldest and largest of pioneering neighborhood redevelopment banks, and still one of the most successful models) and they accepted her proposal. Davis’ work publishing information about economic development for minorities and women gave her the contacts and insights to succeed at this institution as it occupied a new niche in the financial universe.

Even as Davis identified and persuaded similarly pioneering investor-depositors to commit to supporting ShoreBank’s redevelopment mission, she was moving toward another goal. As a bank vice-president at a time when highly placed women were devoting killer hours to their jobs, Davis was equally committed to starting a family and remaining actively involved in the lives of her children. "That’s been the greatest joy of my life. My children have turned out to be just wonderful. That’s one of the things I really feel like I did right." Before flextime was on the corporate radar, Davis trimmed back to working thirty hours per week, taking her compensation purely on commission. By living five minutes from work, she often enjoyed midday breaks with her babies and young children while simultaneously maintaining bank duties.

When it was time to depart South Shore Bank, Davis conducted some soul searching, trying to find her life’s meaning and the next step for her. "I was in a quandary. What am I to do here on Earth?" She wanted to meet some of these other women making their mark. "I had a dream of creating a network of the top women business owners because I had always been very entrepreneurial. After nine years at ShoreBank, I couldn’t see what my path was. I thought that if I could meet the top women business owners in the country I could figure out what I was supposed to do on Earth. They could be role models, and I might be able to better see what my path was."

In the 1970s, as women poured into the work force, the old boys’ network (informally), and men’s private clubs where deals were made, became bastions against the upstart women. Women were nearly invisible; just one woman per organization might be in a leadership role in all kinds of businesses and associations. To each other, they were hidden. Bringing these women together resulted in the Chicago Network, launched in 1976 from the core of eight women who had tried to start the newsweekly, WomanNews. In 1977, Davis drew together a similar group of women in finance, and it became the Chicago Finance Exchange. Completely revolutionary at the time, these were places where women could meet with, and as, equals. These invitation-only networks were places where people with common interests could relate and connect as peers and colleagues. At the national level, the result was a network of the top women business owners called the Committee of 200 (C200).

After launching C200 in 1980, Davis took the first job offered by one Chicago Network member to another. She joined Joan Baratta in the Harris Bank’s personal trust group. Again calling on her network-building expertise, she convened a group of wealthy women who, although nominally in charge of inherited wealth from husbands or fathers, continued to feel disempowered and ill-equipped to handle their finances. Marshalling the resources of Harris Bank to address this issue resulted in an award-winning graduate level personal finance course for this group of customers. "The Financial Forum" went on to educate and empower 1,000 of Chicago’s wealthy women to become hands-on investors. Davis created other innovative networks within Harris Bank for a decade.

Capital Missions Company

In 1990, Davis refocused on her life’s purpose once again. In founding Capital Missions Company (CMC), she brought her skills, contacts, and talents in finance together with her magic at creating productive networks and her commitment to social equity. "Networks of social investors are the key to a globally accountable economy," she observes.

According to the company’s Web site, its strategy is to work "with investors and business leaders who have the long-term goal of a globally-accountable economy. In service of this goal, CMC helps design networks that offer the highest leverage in socially-responsible capital investment, such as the Investors’ Circle and the‘Making A Profit While Making A Difference’ executive committee."

In the past decade, Capital Missions has launched ten different self-sustaining networks, each with its unique thumbprint of interests and concerns. In each, Davis identifies and invites key leaders to join together to make common cause on a specific issue — be it creating pools of capital for women-owned businesses or religious investors. Doing this work over time has shown that, "While skill, intelligence, power, and diligence are crucial qualities in leaders,...problem-solving results are most dependent on qualities of integrity, generosity, and collaborative style." The network invitations focus on assembling a broad and diverse array of leaders willing to collaborate while putting their money where their principles are.

Via CMC, Davis creates networks for those looking for social returns as well as bottom line returns. She is pointing big-time capitalists in the direction of a "triple bottom line" — that is, getting companies as well as major investors to consider social, environmental, as well as financial "bottom lines." She notes, "This principle brings new standards to the financial fiduciaries to look at larger needs." What this sea change means is that at least some of the money is moving to investments with social screens with the help of Davis and powerful financiers who control billions of dollars. In fact, according to Capital Missions Company, "Social investing is the fastest-growing segment of the investment industry and one in ten dollars is now invested with a social screen."

Not only is the money moving to socially responsible investing — and it has for a decade now — the results are in and show that investing with social and environmental consciousness really is good for the businesses (they’re more profitable), and for investors (their returns are as good as or better than other indices). Such "returns" have additional value in that they do not degrade the land, water, or soil, nor the communities of people in which they operate. The ten-year tracking shows that socially responsible companies’ indices are doing as well as the Standard & Poors 500 stock index, and in some instances are doing better.

"Sometimes when we talk about finance, people’s eyes glaze over." Davis likens the attitude about our finances to how medical care used to be. "In the old days, you took your body in to the doctor. The doctor did something, then you took your body home." In medicine, that model has changed, as people are waking up and getting more conscious and collaborative about their health care. A similar change in attitude is needed in the arena of finance. Many people still feel disempowered in regard to their finances, despite today’s ever-present financial reporting, Web sites, talk shows, and how-to books.

But Davis emphasizes that millions of everyday working people have money in pension plans, overseen by fund managers responsible for billions of dollars. If social and environmentally conscious investments are pulling ahead of the pack — if greed on the part of companies and money managers is resulting in less pleasing corporate balance sheets — then Davis contends that it is the fiduciary responsibility of those fund managers to redirect investments into the most productive vehicles.

Individual investors can also find socially screened mutual funds and "redevelopment deposit accounts" (such as the program at ShoreBank, among others) that will pay market rates on money deposited or invested. Investment vehicles with affordable initial purchases geared to individual investors are available for those ready to get conscious about money and investments.

Davis applauds the efforts of entrepreneurs creating conscious businesses or conscious practices. People leading such businesses are really moving in the right direction. She emphasizes, however, that these "conscious businesses" must not overlook the financial component. She suggests that they "Look at finance as a tool, not as an oppressive system. And learn all you can."

Concludes Davis, "Life isn’t about career paths, it’s about destiny paths. Career path is about occasional happiness, as when you get a promotion. Destiny path — finding the reason you’re on the planet — is about joy! It’s about feeling deep soul joy all day long because you’re glorying in doing the work you’ve figured out you’re here on earth to do."

Bobbye Middendorf is a writer and regular contributor to Conscious Choice.

Resources

Visit www.capitalmissions.com for more information on Susan Davis and Capital Missions Company, including the annual spring "Making a Profit While Making a Difference" conference. Visit www.capital missions.com/social/index.html for resources and contacts for social investments, some of which have affordable initial investment levels appropriate for individual investors’ IRAS or other self-managed personal investment accounts. Visit www.socialinvest.org or www.socialfunds.com for information.

The Committee of 200

Operating Principles of Capital Missions Company

1. Tell the truth.

2. A deal is good if it is good for all concerned.

3. Generosity comes back ten-fold to the bottom line.

4. Socially responsible companies are more productive and profitable than others.

5. Water doesn’t rise any higher than its source.

6. Treasure teamwork; share the wealth.

7. The best call a company can get is a call of complaint because it helps it to improve.

8. Love the discipline of the numbers.

9. Never make decisions out of fear.

10. Trust the universe.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: