Last year, Heron decided to pull $30 million of our fixed income portfolio in-house, to be managed by an internal fixed income manager, Barbara VanScoy. In this blog post, we chronicle the experiences that led to and came from that decision.
At Heron, we try to champion people, places, and enterprises who challenge broken conventions and dare to change. In light of COVID-19, we remain committed to our work in communities across the United States.
Heron has had partnerships in Maine since our early days as a foundation. Now, we’re reexamining Maine as a community in transition. Here are some of the inquiries we’re chasing.
At Heron, we try to use all the tools in our toolkit to finance organizations who are serving the people and communities we care about. Recently, we used two different tools to provide financing to Self Help Enterprises (SHE), an organization offering homeownership opportunities in the San Joaquin Valley.
General operating support can provide nonprofit organizations with the flexibility to plan, innovate, and pivot in their work. So, why don’t more foundations provide general operating support as part of their grantmaking strategies? In this post, we chat with Mary Jo Mullan, a former and longtime member of the Heron team, about the importance of general operating support.
Pension liabilities can be a detriment to community prosperity, while pension funds can be a source of power for workers. With those dynamics in mind, here are a few pension-related questions we’re asking this week.
At Heron, we’re always looking for opportunities to better align our investments with our mission — which sometimes involves investing deliberately in specific geographies. Here is a spectrum of strategies that we look to when we are trying to invest in a specific place.
We’re launching a new series called “Questions We’re Asking This Week” that catalogs some of the inquiries we’re chasing in order to help people and communities help themselves.
To convey our mission to our preexisting and prospective managers, Heron has created a Letter of Intent for our fixed income portfolio.
A few years ago, Heron gave a sizable grant to stimulate job growth in a city that had high rates of unemployment. While our intentions were good, our grant resulted in unintended consequences for the community— prompting us to reevaluate how we think about net contribution in a place.