George Suttles is a longtime investment committee member and adviser to philanthropic institutions, with deep experience helping boards think differently about investment stewardship, fiduciary responsibility, and who belongs in the room.

Rini Banerjee is a pioneer in mission-aligned endowment strategy, having spent over a decade helping foundations use their investment policy statements as tools for values alignment—long before most advisors understood what she was asking for.

Together, they brought a rare combination of insider knowledge and strategic challenge to this conversation. George has sat on committees and helped build them. Rini has used the IPS as an organizing document to pull investment committees up from manager selection and into mission. Between them, they helped us understand what investment committees actually do, why they matter more than most people realize, and what it would take to change who sits at the table.

GLOSSARY:

Investment Policy Statement (IPS)

Technical:

A written document that establishes the goals, guidelines, and constraints for managing an organization’s investment portfolio. It typically covers asset allocation targets, risk tolerance, liquidity requirements, and sometimes values-based restrictions.

In practice:

Most foundations have one. Most board members have never read it. Rini has spent years treating the IPS not as a compliance document but as an organizing tool—a way to force the strategic and values conversation that should be happening at the investment committee level but rarely does. When a committee rewrites its IPS through a mission lens, it has to confront the question: what is this endowment actually for?

Why it matters:

The IPS is the rulebook. Change the rulebook, and you change what’s possible. A mission-aligned IPS can open the door to impact investments, ESG screens, and community capital strategies that a default document would never contemplate.

Fiduciary Duty

Technical:

A legal and ethical obligation to act in the best interest of the beneficiary—in this case, the foundation and its mission—rather than in one’s own interest or the interest of any third party.

In practice:

Investment committee members are fiduciaries. That means they can be held legally liable if they make decisions that benefit themselves rather than the institution. For a long time, fiduciary duty was used as an argument against mission-aligned investing: the duty, the argument went, was to maximize financial returns, full stop. That argument has been substantially challenged and largely discredited—but it still comes up, and it’s still used to resist change.

Why it matters:

Understanding fiduciary duty is essential to understanding both the power and the constraints of the investment committee role. It’s also useful for pushing back on the claim that pursuing mission alignment is somehow legally risky.