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A Letter of Introduction From The Portfolio Managers

Brown Advisory has made a deep commitment to sustainable investing, across a wide range of its equity and fixed income strategies. We firmly believe that there does not have to be a trade-off between strong performance and smart investments that help address society’s trickiest sustainability challenges.

For a number of our sustainable investment strategies, we issue formal reports each year to keep clients informed about how those strategies are generating positive impact. Enclosed is our Impact Report for the Brown Advisory Sustainable Small Cap Core strategy.

The report includes a review of our environmental, social and governance (ESG) research and integration approach, and examines how we use both fundamental and ESG research to identify compelling long-term investments. We also discuss the positive environmental and social outcomes being created by our portfolio companies, and report on our engagement and proxy voting activity during the year.

We are pleased to report continued progress and advancement of our sustainable investment initiatives at the firm, particularly our work to develop new investment strategies for our clients. We have launched several new sustainable strategies in the past few years—one being this small-cap strategy, which reached its five-year anniversary on June 30, 2022. More recently (i.e., in 2021 and so far in 2022), we launched our Sustainable International Leaders strategy using the same philosophy as our Global Leaders strategy while investing exclusively outside the U.S.; we also launched the Sustainable Income strategy, emphasizing dividend income. In fixed income, we launched our first global bond strategy, the Global Sustainable Total Return Bond strategy, and built it from the ground up as a sustainable solution for clients.

Further, we have continued to build our team and expertise internally, further integrating fundamental and ESG analysis by adding several new ESG research analysts that act as industry-sector specialists within our process.

We thank our ESG research team for its contribution to this report and our work in general. The team works tirelessly to ensure that our investment decisions are informed by solid ESG data and clear insights about how that data may affect a company’s prospects. We also thank our fundamental equity research colleagues, and all of our colleagues across the firm, for embracing sustainable investing principles so enthusiastically.

Most importantly, we are deeply grateful to our clients, who trust us as stewards of their capital and serve as our partners as we learn, innovate and improve over time. We hope you find this report informative, and we welcome a continuing conversation with you about our work and continuing evolution as investors.

 

Sincerely,

 

Emily Dwyer
Portfolio Manager

Tim Hathaway, CFA
Portfolio Manager; CIO and Head of U.S. Institutional Business