Joan Bavaria; promoted socially responsible investing

Joan Bavaria helped lay out a 10-point code of corporate conduct in areas ranging from energy conservation and waste disposal to sustainable use of natural resources. (Jesse Collins)

Even before the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 prompted investors to question what they were underwriting with their stockholdings, Joan Bavaria was at the forefront of money managers who urged clients to balance a hearty bottom line with a healthy planet.

"Basically, we find that people have been able to compartmentalize their lives, their financial lives, and their moral, ethical, or spiritual lives," she told the Globe in 1986. "The market system allows them to close their eyes and let their dollars be spent in ways that, if they could see it, they probably wouldn't approve."

Three years later, as 11 million gallons of crude oil fouled Prince William Sound and opened the eyes of those who had not paid much attention to the consequences of their investments, Ms. Bavaria became a founder of Ceres, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies. Leading that national organization of environmental groups, investors, and companies, she helped set standards that have become the yardstick for measuring how hundreds of corporations behave, socially and environmentally.

Ms. Bavaria, who also founded and was chief executive of Trillium Asset Management Corp., a majority employee- and women-owned firm in Boston that is a leader in socially responsible investing, died of cancer Nov. 18 at her home in Marblehead. She was 65.

Three years ago, the Harvard Business Review wrote that Ms. Bavaria "saw a unique moment in which to make ethical investing a viable business, then established Trillium to execute her plan."

The theory she brought to investing was, on one level, quite simple: Behavior has consequences. While images of the Valdez oil spill still lingered in the news media, she told the Globe in December 1989: "Companies with unsound environmental practices could become involved in costly litigation."

As a principal author of the Valdez Principles, which later evolved into the Ceres Principles, Ms. Bavaria helped lay out a 10-point code of corporate conduct in areas ranging from energy conservation and waste disposal to sustainable use of resources.

She remained cochairwoman of Ceres. In the late 1990s, the organization worked with the United Nations to launch the Global Reporting Initiative, a framework for corporations to report on their economic performances with a focus on environmental and social strategies. The Global Reporting Initiative, which became a separate institution several years ago, says 1,500 companies around the world have adopted its reporting guidelines.

"She had a powerful vision," said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres. "Joan took issues that were foreign to companies and made them part of their everyday discussions."

But when Ms. Bavaria first began pushing for socially responsible investing nearly three decades ago, "it was clearly treated as an absolutely harebrained idea," said Blaine Townsend, who manages Trillium's San Francisco office. "It was heresy."

In the early 1980s, just before Ms. Bavaria founded Trillium out of what had been the Boston firm Franklin Research & Development Corp., she launched the Social Investment Forum, made up of representatives from banks and community loan funds focused on promoting investment that was environmentally and socially sound.

"There's no such thing as completely clean money," she told the Globe in 1981. "If you look deeply enough, just about anywhere you'll find something."

But by looking more deeply than others and by getting investors and environmental groups to work together, Ms. Bavaria strove to make financial stakes as clean as possible. Through the forum and later with Ceres, "she essentially helped create the field of socially responsible investing," Townsend said. "Joan really set out not only to create her own company for her clients, but to build her own competition."

"We are trying, in a very fundamental way, to change the way corporations look at the environment and at their practices around the environment," she told The Washington Post in 1990.

"She was courageous at a time when nobody was thinking that way, finding corporate leaders to adopt that vision," Lubber said. "But in a world where people are competitive and cutthroat and step on each other to get the job done, Joan built communities, rather than winning at the cost of people."

Growing up in Western Massachusetts, where her family ran a bakery in Shelburne Falls, in the Town of Buckland, Joan Crocker graduated from high school at Arms Academy in 1961. She briefly attended the Massachusetts College of Art and married Frederick Clark, her high school sweetheart. Over the next few years, they had two sons and divorced. By 1967, she was working for Bank of Boston.

She was, by her own accounting, a neophyte in the finance world. Asked by the Globe in 1989 what she knew about money when she started in the field, she quipped: "Only my checkbook." A quick study, she soon managed dozens of accounts in the bank's trust division. In the mid-1970s, she left to work at Franklin Management, a money management firm in Boston, and helped form its spin-off, Franklin Research & Development.

Ms. Bavaria married and divorced twice more before meeting Jesse Collins 11 years ago. They married in 2000.

"She had no ego at all," Collins said. "She didn't have to take credit for anything, and she really consciously studied conflict resolution so that she could get diverse groups to come together."

At home, Ms. Bavaria "was a ferocious reader," Collins said. "She could read a book in the time that it took me to read a magazine."

At work, she was a boss who could be approached by anyone.

"We have a firm where people could talk casually and openly with the CEO of the company, as if they were peers," Townsend said. "They could talk about singing or dancing or being a parent - those things were just as valued by Joan. Almost anybody that she had any level of professional exposure with felt they had a special relationship with her, because they did. There was no pretense about her."

In addition to her husband, Ms. Bavaria leaves her sons, Christopher Clark of Marblehead and Colin Clark of Salem; three sisters, Pat Pyott and Teri Miller, both of Shelburne Falls, and Janet Bowers of Gill; a granddaughter; and a grandson.

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on Dec. 11 in Arlington Street Church in Boston. Burial will be private.