Insight's Evergreen Fund

Insight offers an ethically screened fund – the Insight Investment Evergreen Fund  to both individual (retail) and institutional investors.

The Fund's ethical screens

The Evergreen Fund is a global fund that is ‘negatively screened’, meaning that it avoids investing in companies that provide certain ‘restricted’ products and services such as tobacco, gambling and pornography. The Fund also invests in ‘positive impact’ stocks – companies whose products and/or services provide a particularly beneficial social or environmental product or service to society (e.g. renewable energy, environmental technologies, affordable mortgages, healthcare, water purification). The formal ethical policy of the Fund can be found in our brochure “Investing for your future”.

Insight is committed to diligently implementing the ethical policy of the Evergreen Fund. Therefore, these policies are supported by criteria that provide more detailed guidance on how the policy is interpreted and applied in practice. The purpose of these criteria is two-fold:

1. To reduce subjectivity and ensure, as far as possible, consistent interpretation (both in letter and in spirit) and implementation of the Fund’s ethical policy.
2. To communicate to interested parties, as clearly as possible, how the Fund's policy is being put into practice.

Insight regularly reviews these detailed criteria and updates them as appropriate.

Engagement

Insight actively engages with companies held in our Evergreen Fund. For example, we have engaged with D1 Oils, a UK producer of biodiesel, to encourage it to ensure the sustainable production of jatropha oil, its primary feedstock, as well as the responsible sourcing of its other feedstocks, including palm oil. Following our suggestions, the company committed to develop appropriate policies and management systems. The company also told us that it planned to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a global multi-stakeholder initiative on sustainable palm oil that recently developed a Code of Conduct for the industry.

As another example of the effectiveness of our engagement, our communication with Tiffany & Co., a US jewellery company, on environmental management systems, prompted the company to reconsider the need to be more transparent about its corporate responsibility efforts. The company recently added a corporate responsibility section to its website and is considering centralising all of its corporate responsibility activities under a single corporate vice president reporting directly to the Chief Executive.

Factsheets

Each month, Insight publishes an updated factsheet for the Evergreen Fund. This factsheet details fund performance, provides country and sector breakdowns, and lists the Fund's ten largest holdings.

Briefings

Insight periodically publishes briefings on issues on significant environmental or social themes such as climate change policy, obesity, etc. These briefings also often highlight stocks that are held in the Fund, detailing our investment rationale.

Eurosif Transparency Guidelines

Insight is a signatory to the voluntary “Eurosif Transparency Guidelines for the Retail SRI Sector”. These Guidelines are intended to help consumers understand the ethical policies and practices of individual ethical funds in order to maintain and increase consumer confidence. Signatories are required to make information about their funds’ policies and processes publically available. Click here for our response to the Guidelines.

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