Seeking a Higher Type of Return

RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED hate crimes are on the rise in the U.S. Anti-Muslim marches are held around the country. Synagogues receive bomb threats.

And yet interreligious collaboration is also on the rise. With the Jubilee Assembly, faith-motivated investors are pooling their tithes, zakah, and offerings for a higher purpose. The coalition takes its name from the ancient concept of “jubilee”—a regular season of mandated communal economic redistribution, justice, and equity in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Joshua Brockwell, a member of the Jubilee Assembly organizing team, works at Azzad Asset Management, a Muslim-led investment company. “By collaborating and putting our money where our morals are,” wrote Brockwell, “the Jubilee Assembly provides an opportunity to live out our common values and make an impact in our communities.”

Muslim investors operate under strict requirements: To be considered halal (permissible), investments cannot be in alcohol, weapons, or pork; neither can Muslim investors make any money through interest (a difficult restriction in our modern economy). Institutions such as Azzad help Muslim investors stay on the right side of these calculations. “Charity is essential to the proper practice of Islamic investing,” Brockwell said in a press release announcing that Azzad’s U.S. Muslim investors had donated $4.6 million to charity for Ramadan.

Jewish investors in the fund follow principles of tzedakah, or righteous giving. The Jewish philosopher Maimonides identified the highest level of tzedakah as supporting one in need with a gift, loan, or job. “Maimonides understood that a loan which helps individuals become economically self-sufficient is far more valuable than a one-time contribution,” wrote Sandra Lawson, a rabbinical student and Jubilee Assembly committee member.

Christian institutions make up most of the investors. “We strongly feel a great commonality with each other—that being a special concern for the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized,” said Baptist church member Andy Loving, founder of Just Money Advisors and a consultant to the Jubilee Assembly.

Using the Calvert Foundation’s Community Investment Note—a financial instrument designed primarily to resource low-income communities—the Jubilee Assembly anticipates its investments will make money. Profit and sustainability remain motives of the fund, but it also operates out of spiritual and ethical tenets. Faith communities or pension funds might see higher returns in other types of investments, but would lose the social and spiritual capital gained through Jubilee.

In the last two years, Jubilee has made a $500,000 loan to Chicago’s Garfield Produce Company, a hydroponic vertical vegetable farm in a neighborhood with nearly 50 percent unemployment and little access to fresh produce, and a $3 million loan to New Orleans-based PosiGen, a solar energy company bringing efficiency and renewable power to low-income households. Right now, Jubilee Assembly has more than $275 million that it lends out and invests.

In addition to making direct gifts to individuals in need, interreligious investors are joining their social tithes to create greater impact to support renewable energy, provide jobs, and transform neighborhoods. With profit as only one of multiple bottom lines, new possibilities open up for social change.

All forms of investment—in the stock market or in people—involve risk. Loans fail, people betray, and money is lost. But for people of faith, the risk is underwritten by trust in God. Jews, Muslims, and Christians bring a variety of ethical views to the difficulties of ethical investing in a market organized for greed. Jubilee Assembly is one way churches, mosques, and temples are stronger together when they match money with morality.