The Social Side Webinar Series (Ep. 1): Capital for Justice: Investment Strategies that Support Stronger Communities

What is 'The Social Side'?

The Social Side of Sustainable Investing is a quarterly webinar series designed to explore the complex social issues shaping investment risks, opportunities, and long-term value creation. While environmental topics often dominate sustainable investing conversations, social factors (workforce well-being, human rights, public health, housing, financial inclusion, criminal justice, education, and community resilience) are increasingly recognized as material considerations for investors seeking to understand both risks and opportunities.

Each one-hour webinar will feature practitioners, investors, researchers, and subject matter experts who bring diverse perspectives and real-world experience to today's most pressing social challenges. Discussions will focus on how investors can evaluate these issues through a sustainable investing lens, understand emerging investment strategies, engage with companies and communities, and better serve clients whose values and financial goals intersect with these topics.

Designed for financial advisors, wealth managers, institutional investors, investment professionals, and individual investors, the series will provide practical, nonpartisan education that helps participants navigate the evolving "S" dimension of ESG while highlighting innovative approaches to building stronger communities and more resilient economies.

Webinar Details

For many sustainable investors, discussions about criminal justice begin and end with screening out private prison companies. Yet the opportunities to support healthier, more resilient communities through investment are far broader.

The U.S. criminal justice system has profound economic impacts on individuals, families, employers, and local communities. Investors increasingly recognize that issues such as incarceration, reentry, access to housing and employment, community development, and equitable economic opportunity are material social factors that can influence long-term economic outcomes.

Join us for a conversation with leaders working at the intersection of finance and criminal justice reform as we explore how investors can better understand these challenges and identify investment approaches that seek to create positive social impact. This discussion will examine the role of shareholder engagement, community investing, public and private-market strategies, and innovative investment vehicles designed to strengthen communities affected by incarceration.

Whether you are a financial advisor, institutional investor, wealth management professional, or individual investor, this webinar will provide practical insights into how capital can support long-term community resilience while helping clients align their investments with their values.

Speakers:

Roberto Thornton, Adasina Social Capital

Roberto Thornton serves as Co-CEO at Adasina, bringing 15 years of financial industry experience and more than a decade of grassroots social justice organizing to his leadership. In this role, he provides strategic direction in support of Adasina's mission, ensuring alignment between long-term priorities, strategic execution, and daily firm management.

Since joining Adasina near its founding, Roberto has held several leadership roles, including Managing Director of Investment & Impact and Director of Public Equities. He has played a key role in shaping the firm’s strategy, leading complex initiatives, and guiding Adasina through periods of growth and transition. His leadership is rooted in empathy, self-awareness, and the conviction that effective executive decision-making requires both emotional and intellectual attunement.

Prior to joining Adasina, Roberto held several positions at Vanguard, specializing in over-the-counter derivative valuation, collateral management, and human-centered process optimization. Earlier in his career, he worked in retail and business banking.

Roberto is committed to advancing racial, gender, economic, and climate justice through both his professional leadership and community engagement. His advocacy leadership focuses on intersectional issues impacting Black and transgender communities, including advising on employee benefits expansion and retention initiatives for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ employees in investment management. He has been published in Philadelphia Magazine and has been a guest lecturer at Bard College. He is a former Board Member of the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund, an alum of the New Leaders Council Fellowship Program, and is currently an advisory board member for the Black Leadership Action Coalition of Kentucky (BLACK) and the Black Leadership Action Coalition of Kentucky Action Fund (BLACK AF).

As a graduate of the Fox School of Business at Temple University, Roberto spent nearly two decades in Philadelphia and now resides in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. He enjoys documentaries, food adventures, time outdoors with his spouse and kiddo, and the Philadelphia Eagles (Go, Birds!)

Chris Bentley, De-carceration Fund

Chris Bentley has spent 20 years proving that private capital belongs alongside policy and philanthropy in the effort to shrink the criminal legal system’s footprint on American life, one company at a time.

Chris is co-founder of the De-carceration Fund, built on a simple but underexplored idea: that businesses which keep people out of the criminal legal system, help them successfully reenter society, or ease the suffering of those currently caught up in it can also be some of the best-performing companies in the market. The fund’s first effort backed 12 such companies and generated more than $286 million in independently verified impact, from years of incarceration avoided to jobs created for returning citizens. Chris is now working to scale that same idea further, bringing more capital and attention to a category of founders the market has long overlooked.

Before co-founding the De-carceration Fund with Lawrence Williams in 2020, Chris spent more than a decade working at the intersection of business and social impact, backing early-stage companies addressing poverty, unemployment, and inequality. That work took him through Serious Change Investments, SustainVC, and GoodCompany Ventures, an accelerator he co-founded for entrepreneurs building solutions to large, unmet social needs. Along the way, he supported companies including a prison communications platform and an educational technology provider serving incarcerated students.

Chris has spent as much energy defining justice tech as an idea as he has investing in it. He helped shape one of the first industry-wide reports on the sector, and he advises organizations including As You Sow’s Prison Free Funds initiative and the Fair Food Fund on how capital can be used more ethically.
Chris holds a BS in Engineering from Northeastern University and an MBA in Finance from Temple University. He lives and works at the intersection of capital and conviction, betting that private investment, paired with strong policy and philanthropic work, is how the country builds better alternatives to a broken system.