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.

Allison Cartwright joined The Nature Conservancy in May 2022 and serves as an Investment Coordinator. Her responsibilities include logistics planning and support for the Chief Investment Officer, in addition to assisting with the day-to-day execution of investment operations tasks.

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.

Alexis Ercolino joined The Nature Conservancy in May 2022 and serves as a Senior Operations Analyst. Her primary responsibilities include performance analysis, data management, monitoring and processing cash movements, and reporting for TNC’s long-term investment assets.

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.

Molly O’Connor joined The Nature Conservancy in July 2021 and serves as a Senior Investment Analyst. Her primary responsibilities include assisting with manager selection, monitoring, and analytics within hedged strategies and private investments.

LiPing Price joined The Nature Conservancy in October 2012 and serves as the Director of Investment Administration. Her responsibilities include investment operations, performance analysis and reporting, operational risk management, compliance and due diligence.

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.

Nina Stein joined The Nature Conservancy in July 2021 and serves as an Investment Analyst. Her primary responsibilities include assisting with manager selection, monitoring and maximizing impact within TNC's impact and diversity strategies.

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.