TIIP Releases Case Study on Surdna Foundation’s Endowment Transformation Strategy

Reposting from The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), an impact investing partner of the Surdna Foundation. We are proud to support TIIP’s work to educate and empower institutional investors to engage with core social issues like racial justice and social inequality within their portfolios.

March 31, 2026 – New York, NY – Today, The Investment Integration Project (TIIP) released another in-depth case study examining how the Surdna Foundation, one of the oldest and largest family-led foundations in the United States with approximately $1.2 billion in assets, has transformed its endowment into a strategic instrument for racial and social justice through a pioneering system-level investing approach.

The report offers an in-depth look at how Surdna has moved beyond treating impact as a carve-out, instead treating the entire endowment as a site of intervention—recognizing that long-term portfolio performance is inseparable from the health of the environmental, social, and financial systems that sustain it.

“Capital markets are not neutral, and persistent inequities shape how risk and opportunity are priced,” said Don Chen, president of the Surdna Foundation. “Addressing racial inequity and power imbalances is critical to solving many of the long-term and embedded social, environmental, economic, and cultural challenges that communities across the U.S. face. This is why a system-level approach to investing is not just mission-driven—it is financially sound.”

The case study details Surdna’s comprehensive approach organized across three complementary roles the endowment can play: Scale (backing institutional-quality strategies that any peer could adopt), Deepen (expanding the investable universe around racial and social equity), and Transform (building market infrastructure through catalytic investments and field-building).

“Surdna’s journey is a story about endowment transformation,” said William Burckart, CEO of TIIP. “It shows what happens when a foundation stops treating impact as a carve-out and starts treating the endowment itself as a strategic tool—a platform for scaling what works, deepening the opportunity set, and prototyping the market infrastructure we will need for the next economy. That shift is not only compatible with fiduciary duty; it is demanded by it.”

Surdna’s system-level investing strategy is structured across three capital pools: Mission-Related Investments (MRI) for proven, institutional-quality strategies; an Adjusted Risk Pool (ARP) for emerging theses that repair linkages between markets and social justice; and Program-Related Investments (PRI) for catalytic, transformative work that challenges norms and fills structural gaps.

Key highlights include:

• Total impact investment commitments surpassing $240 million as of December 2025, with $53 million in cash already returned for grantmaking and operations
• MRI investments returning 11.1% annually since inception, outperforming the broader endowment
• Diverse-owned firms now managing 67% of MRI assets
• Commitments to diverse-owned firms has grown from under 15% to approximately 36% across the entire endowment
• Support for over 25 Fund I managers, with early catalytic investments helping surface managers who later attracted wide institutional follow-on capital
• Pioneer role in developing Cambridge Associates’ Social and Environmental Equity (SEE) framework, now adopted by multiple peer institutions
• Field-building grants supporting infrastructure organizations, including TIIP, The Shareholder Commons, and The Predistribution Initiative

“Surdna’s approach demonstrates that equitable practices in capital allocation and strong financial performance are not mutually exclusive,” said Monique Aiken, TIIP’s managing director. “By backing overlooked managers, building shared market infrastructure, and advancing new standards of diligence and engagement, Surdna is reshaping what institutional investing can and should accomplish.”

The report also highlights that Surdna’s investment beliefs are anchored in the understanding that racial inequity cannot be diversified away—like climate risk, its financial relevance can intensify rapidly and affect all asset classes at once, making it a core fiduciary concern.

This report is part of TIIP’s case study series examining how leading institutional investors are implementing system-level investing strategies to address systemic risks while fulfilling fiduciary duties.

Download the full report here.

About The Investment Integration Project (TIIP)

The Investment Integration Project (TIIP) is a boutique consulting firm that helps institutional investors 1) understand how portfolio performance is intertwined with the health of environmental, social, and financial systems; 2) shape the structures and norms influencing those systems; and 3) embed systems-aware decision-making across all strategies and operations.

Established in 2015 by Steve Lydenberg and William Burckart—who coined the term system-level investing—TIIP’s pioneering thought leadership has enabled the alignment of investment practices with the long-term health of the systems underpinning value creation. At the center of TIIP’s work is SAIL (Systems Aware Investing Launchpad), an enterprise management and data platform that enables investors to integrate system-level investing across strategy, implementation, and governance. TIIP also offers customized services—Total Portfolio Activation, Total Portfolio Implementation, and Total Portfolio Review—to help clients benchmark progress, enhance portfolio design and stewardship, and apply system-level thinking in practice.

About the Surdna Foundation

The Surdna Foundation seeks to foster sustainable communities in the United States — communities guided by principles of social justice and distinguished by healthy environments, inclusive economies, and thriving cultures. For over five generations, the foundation has been governed largely by descendants of John E. Andrus and has developed a tradition of innovative service for those in need of help or opportunity.

Acknowledgments: This report was researched and written by TIIP’s Melissa Eng, William Burckart, Monique Aiken, and Jessica Ziegler, with design support from Alex Lumelsky at SKY Creative.