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资本市场是我们经济的氧气，Greenfin顾问和哈佛扩展学校instructorGraham Sinclair has told me.

Sticking with his corporeal comparison, asset owners may be the diaphragm, maintaining a steady flow of oxygen with a long-term interest in keeping the whole system alive.

But asset owners are not a monolith in scale, substance or influence. As a primer, asset owners are pension funds, insurance company general accounts, outsourced CIOs, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), family offices, endowments and foundations. Pension funds and SWFsown全球资产的大部分总计约为32万亿美元 - 在上下文中，占全球GDP的近40％。

学生活动家比养老金领取者更多的头条新闻。

尽管美国大学捐赠基金的市场价值有些shy of$1 trillion, what the category lacks in scale it makes up for in social and cultural capital. As Jeff Mindlin, chief investment officer for ASU’s endowment, told me, "Higher education only makes up 5 percent of the carbon footprint, but 100 percent of the learning imprint."

当涉及到如何考虑ESG并将其集成到捐赠基金资产分配中时，这种文化资本尤其重要。Pressure is undoubtedly applied to pension funds and SWFs by their principals to maintain long-term value through investments, but the comparatively clunky and quiet world of pensions and SWFs doesn’t occupy the same real estate in our collective cultural imagination and shared narrative as universities do.

The upshot: Student activists garner more headlines than pensioners. Particularly in discussions on climate and more specifically on the perennial "divest or engage" question — a core tension in our era of "ESG2.0。"

以哈佛大学为例，该机构在塞勒姆女巫审判之前支付了学费，现在是世界上最大的大学捐赠的所在地 - 超过530亿美元，截至去年秋天。Sustained and highly visible student pressure and protest to force Harvard’s endowment to take the divestment path — despite thedubiousnessof the strategy’s success — worked. Harvard University president Lawrence Bacowrespondedlast year that "legacy investments" through third-party firms "are in runoff mode." An opaque, restrained and reluctantly delivered translation of "divestment."

Similarly, Arizona State University (ASU) is a cultural institution in the sustainability space: home to the first dedicated sustainability school in the U.S., first on the Sierra Club’slist在北美最环保的大学，连续七年，rankedNo. 1 as the most innovative university in the U.S. News & World Report. (Sorry, Stanford.)

It’s also home to an endowment whose holistic method of embedding ESG piqued my interest. In particular, how the ASU Foundation — the private, nonprofit company that manages the university’s endowment — incorporates students as empowered and active agents in the fund’s approach to ESG.

Surmounting financial complexity

As the ESG investing space grows and Gen Z goes in search of careers in "impact," those who are trying to wade into the space without a traditional financial education are encountering the financial complexity complex en masse. But the moats, fencing and gates that guard the complex — built of jargon, exclusive relationships and networks — is maybe not so complex.

Trevor Harper, an ASU student pursuing a masters in sustainability solutions and one of the 20 students across disciplines who helped draft recommendations for ASU Foundation's Proxy Voting Guidelines, shared an anecdote with me that may be relatable to those who feel powerless to push for change from within the system.

The English-major-turned-company-engager told me: "Anyone can learn anything, right? We put ourselves in silos and we get cynical about how we can’t make a difference. We think, ‘Well, I don't know anything about that so how could I get involved?’" As fellow masters student Gabriela McCrossan shared, "The answer is always no if you don’t ask the question."

With top notch sustainability educations under their belts, they set out to get smart on the intersection of sustainability and capital markets. With a faculty that strives to embody the "New American University" — a模型of simultaneously pursuing excellence, maintaining broad access to quality education and creating meaningful societal impact — they found support and empowerment from the institution to participate in shaping the endowment’s approach to engaging with invested companies.

这里值得注意的是，ASU基金会可持续投资的方法融合了大学主要利益相关者群体的思维和信念：学生。这也是一种赋予下一代领导者的方法，他们将在紧迫地解决气候危机方面的任务更加严重。

When the Business Roundtable, a lobbyist association of American CEOs,proclaims一种崇高而令人钦佩的愿望，即“重新定义公司促进为所有美国人服务的经济的目的”，人们可以合理地假设，实际圆桌会议上的现实世界对话并不与该宣言如此整齐。而且，由于桌子上没有空间 - 这是为CEO，而不是我们其他人 - 假设我们只能做到。

Getting engaged

ASU Enterprise Partners的模型实际上将他们代表他们服务的人纳入了人们的努力。帮助起草捐赠的20名学生的代理投票准则来自大学的部门，而不仅仅是商学院。而且，从一个人的嘴里放钱的是 - 另一名ASU硕士学生兼学校可持续和影响财务计划的校长Nico McCrossan实际上是ASU基金会的投资团队，是Mindlin领导下的ESG分析师。

回到长期以来的剥离与参与线程：“我们的目标是脱碳，而不是剥离，”麦克罗斯安告诉我。“我们从减少现实世界排放的目标中看一下它。我们将参与视为通往这一点的最佳途径，因为我们需要最大的发射器才能真正减少他们的排放。这就是我们将看到巨大影响的地方。”

需要明确的是，这不是一个不错的学生锻炼或有抱负的系统性变化，例如业务圆桌会议。通过ASU的可持续和影响财务计划，学生们选择以分配的金额进行投资，以便与雪佛龙交战。学生与石油专业的大量交往，讨论了与气候变化和资源使用相关的商业实践，并寻求明确拟议气候监管，正在进行的诉讼和雪佛龙公司的社会许可的投资风险。根据他们的经验，雪佛龙一直是一个活跃的听众（如果不是活跃的行动者）。

Again, the university endowment corner of the asset owner realm isn’t in the trillions, but what would it look like if others opened the aperture on who is heard, and on who can advise and advocate from within?

如果这是一所新美国大学的一部分，那么一家新的美国公司会做什么？解决气候变化需要一种全方位的甲板方法，这种新的甲板手的整体方式是有希望的。