Can the money you invest reflect what you actually care about? For 35 years, that question has been at the heart of Domini’s work, and of a broader shift in how the financial world thinks about its role.
It’s also the question behind National Impact Investing Day, observed each year on June 3, the anniversary of the Domini Impact Equity Fund, one of the first sustainable mutual funds in the world. To mark the occasion, Domini CEO Carole Laible sat down with Founder and Chair Amy Domini for a wide-ranging conversation about where impact investing began, how far it has come, and the work still ahead.
It Started with Investors’ Values
Amy began her career in the 1970s as a stockbroker, a role she compares to today’s financial advisor, back when investors still picked individual stocks. She learned quickly that she had to listen as much as advise. Clients kept raising industries they wanted no part of. One didn’t want anything tied to tobacco after losing a parent to it. Another wouldn’t touch the weapons industry after losing a brother in Vietnam.
So Amy started asking a simple question during her intake conversations: is there an area you don’t want to invest in? The answers surprised her, and so did how little research existed to help clients act on their values. She began teaching a course she called “Ethical Investing” at Cambridge Adult Education, which quickly led to a book of the same name.
Writing in the context of the era, with apartheid in South Africa, the aftermath of Vietnam, and debates over community reinvestment all in the background, Amy arrived at a conviction that still anchors Domini today: the investments we make now build the society we live in tomorrow.
Proving the Skeptics Wrong
By the late 1980s, Amy set out to test that conviction directly. She helped create the Domini 400 Social Index, the first index of its kind, to confront three objections she heard again and again: that screening investments would inevitably lower returns; that there were no credible standards for deciding what to screen; and that investors should simply maximize profits and address social concerns through charity instead.
The index answered all three. Over its first two decades, it kept pace with, and at times outperformed, the broad market. What especially struck Amy was the pattern. In strong months it tended to run a bit further ahead, and in weak months it tended to fall a bit less behind. She came to see that as a signal about management quality. Evaluating a company’s environmental and social practices, she realized, was another way of identifying which companies were simply better run.
The Three Pillars of Impact Investing
Over time, Amy came to describe impact investing as a “three-legged stool,” though she’s quick to credit the early community of activists, shareholders, and portfolio managers who shaped the field together. The framework captures what impact investors do, and it offers a useful checklist for anyone evaluating a sustainable investment product:
- Better Investors: Applying social, environmental, and financial standards, including industry-specific key performance indicators, to the investment decision-making process.
- Better Owners: Engaging directly with corporate management to understand and address the risks tied to their industries, from environmental impact to labor conditions in global supply chains.
- Better Neighbors: Supporting community development through loans to nonprofits and other institutions that make a tangible difference, whether building a hospital, a public playground, or other community assets.
As Amy put it, when you’re evaluating any sustainable investing product, ask what tools it puts to work on being a better investor, a better owner, and a better neighbor.
How Far the Field Has Come
The ideas that once made Amy an outlier are now, in many respects, simply how the market works. When she built the Domini 400 Social Index in 1990, corporate sustainability reporting essentially didn’t exist. Today, she pointed to a very different landscape:
- A study by the Governance & Accountability Institute found that 99% of S&P 500 companies and 94% of Russell 1000 companies published sustainability reports.
- The IFRS Foundation reports that global reporting standards are expanding, with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the ISSB’s global standards both taking effect, and jurisdictions representing roughly half of global GDP signaling intent to adopt them.
- According to Deloitte’s CxO Sustainability Report, 85% of executives say their organizations have increased sustainability investments over the past year.
- Accenture’s UN Global Compact CEO Study found that 88% of CEOs say the case for sustainability is stronger than it was five years ago.
- PwC’s Annual Global CEO Survey reported that 56% of CEOs globally say their personal incentive compensation is linked to sustainability metrics.
- According to a recent Quarterly Market Update, the World Bank Group reported that cumulative global issuance of green, social, sustainability, sustainability-linked, and transition bonds reached $7.25 trillion as of March 2026, a figure Amy called “inconceivable in 1990.”
None of this happened on its own, she emphasized. Decades of investors asking questions, filing proposals, and making sustainability an issue, in a coordinated and across-the-board way, helped move these practices from the margins to the mainstream. “I thank my investors,” she said. “They’ve made a difference.” As Carole put it, returning to an old adage, what gets measured gets managed: by sending the message that people, planet, and profit can be pursued together, and that doing so can help a company thrive, investors have changed corporate behavior in ways that would have been unimaginable three decades ago.
Your Part in What Comes Next
If you’re already a Domini shareholder, you’re part of the story Amy just told, the coordinated pressure that helped move these practices into the mainstream. The invitation now is to keep going, and to bring others in. And for anyone considering a first step, getting started is simpler than most people expect. Amy’s hope for the future echoes something her longtime collaborator Steve Lydenberg often says: that one day, investors won’t need to define themselves as “ethical,” “responsible,” or “impact.” It will simply be called investing. Finance, she argued, is too large and too powerful to sit on the sidelines of the challenges we face. “There’s no way that finance isn’t part of the solution.”
Getting there starts with a single step, and it’s one any investor can take. Begin with what you already own, whether that’s a 401(k), an IRA, or an existing brokerage account. Look at how those companies actually invest, and ask whether their policies have real teeth or just loose language. Our National Impact Investing Day hub outlines some questions you can ask to get started.
Every step counts, Amy stressed, even a small first one, because once you become a responsible investor, an entire industry goes to work on your behalf.
“We can do this together. It’s a planet worth saving, and there are a lot of wonderful things an individual can do to be part of the solution, but in my own humble opinion, the most straightforward is to become a responsible investor.”
— Amy Domini
This conversation is a look at how far impact investing has come in 35 years, and an invitation to consider where your own investments fit in. Watch the full conversation in the video above or on Domini’s YouTube channel.