Office of Investments

Bola Olusanya joined The Nature Conservancy in March 2020 as Vice President and Chief Investment Officer. He provides leadership, vision and oversight to the management and strategic growth of the Conservancy’s multibillion dollar endowment and other long-term investment assets. Bola has over 25 years of experience in investment management as an executive and a thought leader.

Varun Agarwal joined The Nature Conservancy in April 2024 as the Associate Director of Operations and Risk. His primary responsibilities include analytics, reporting and handling day-to-day investment operations.

Seth Brotman joined The Nature Conservancy in April 2024 and serves as the Chief Operating Officer/Director of Risk, Portfolio Strategy, and Operations. His role involves driving strategic initiatives, managing risk, and optimizing portfolio performance.

Nico Choksi joined The Nature Conservancy in June 2024 and serves as Senior Investment Manager. His primary responsibilities include investment due diligence, research and monitoring across TNC's private investments and within healthcare and technology opportunities.

Vicky Dorsey joined The Nature Conservancy in January 2021 and serves as the Chief of Staff. Her primary responsibilities include oversight of the Office of Investments and strategic initiatives. 

Jessica Eastling joined The Nature Conservancy in May 2022 and serves as a Director of Investments. Her primary responsibilities include helping to grow and manage the private investment portfolio, particularly related to impact and diversity, while also leading the team’s co-investment program to further support mission-aligned companies.

Hiba Haris joined The Nature Conservancy in July 2021 and serves as an Investment Manager. Her primary responsibilities include assisting in investing and managing TNC's private investments, in addition to leading private investment analytics.

Zain Ijaz joined The Nature Conservancy in October 2023 and serves as an Investment Analyst. His primary responsibilities include assisting with manager selection, monitoring and analytics within public and private investments.

Molly O'Connor joined The Nature Conservancy in July 2021 and serves as an Investment Manager. Her primary responsibilities include assisting with manager selection, monitoring and analytics within fixed income strategies and private investments.

David Ruffer joined The Nature Conservancy in September 2020 and serves as a Director of Investments. His primary responsibilities include overseeing the private investment and hedged strategies portfolios.

Ian Smith joined The Nature Conservancy in September 2020 and serves as a Director of Investments. His primary responsibilities include manager due diligence, research, and portfolio oversight across public equity, fixed income and impact and diversity offerings.

Suzanne Thilenius joined The Nature Conservancy in April 2024 and serves as the Executive Coordinator. Her primary responsibilities include supporting the Chief Investment Officer with logistics planning and facilitating operational execution within the Office of Investments.

Sam Towne joined The Nature Conservancy in January 2021 and serves as a Senior Investment Manager. His primary responsibilities include investment due diligence, monitoring, and analytics within TNC’s public equity and hedged strategies portfolios.

The talent and experience of an investment firm’s key personnel provides insights into its prospects for sustainable success. We look for a consistent core team, competitive spirit and passion, a culture built on honesty and integrity that embraces continuous learning, clear decision-making and accountability, and a firm that is built to last.

Managers that best exploit market inefficiencies focus on deep research, driving outcomes, dislocated markets, and discount to intrinsic value. Importantly, a candidate must be able to articulate a clear, identifiable competitive edge and seek asymmetric return distributions that provide a margin of safety.

We determine if there is a well-defined and repeatable investment decision-making process in place along with a sound business and operational framework. We look for a clearly documented and consistently applied investment process, ideally one that is based in fundamental, bottom-up research with a strong emphasis on stress-testing.

It is critical that we understand the manager’s portfolio construction and risk management process. Understanding the use of leverage, liquidity management, position concentrations, and a history of strategy drifts are important considerations. Further, we assess portfolio risk and performance attribution.

Since our goal is to build long-term relationships with our investment managers, we seek strong alignment of interests, firm stability, and evidence of controlled growth in organization-wide managed assets.

We must understand a manager’s performance cyclicality, the link between investment process and performance, how much of performance is driven by idiosyncratic factors versus common risk factors, and performance relative to benchmarks/peers.

Fees must be reasonable and align with our risk-adjusted return expectations. Management fees should be for keeping the lights on, while incentive fees should have a hurdle rate or preferred return, high-water mark, and/or claw back provisions.

We believe it is our fiduciary duty to prudently manage risk and return, while also paralleling our conservation mission and our support of sustainability-minded corporations.

Companies that generate 5% or more of their annual revenues from extractive activities.

Companies where estimated environmental damage costs, for direct greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, are 5% or more of annual revenues.

Companies where estimated environmental damage costs, for direct and indirect (or supply chain) natural resource use, are 5% or more of annual revenues.

Companies with quantifiable future emissions from proven and probable fossil fuel reserves.

Companies in the “Tobacco” industry as classified by the Global Industry Classification System (GICS).

Companies that derive 25% or more of revenues from 1) military armored vehicle, tank, and tank component manufacturing, 2) ammunition manufacturing, 3) arms, ordnance, and accessories manufacturing, and 4) metal tank (heavy gauge) manufacturing.

The largest known public and private for-profit prisons.