2020 RIA Leadership Award: Winners & Finalists - Responsible Investment Association

The RIA is pleased to announce the winners and finalists of the inaugural 2020 RIA Leadership Awards:

Market Education (Organizational)

Winner: NATOA/SHARE
Project: Reconciliation and Responsible Investment Initiative (RRII) (collaborative entry)

Finalist: Genus Capital Management
Project: Driving awareness and demand for responsible investments.

Integration (Organizational)

Winner: Sustainalytics
Project: Sustainalytics roll-out of flagship ESG Risk Ratings

Finalist: Inspirit Foundation
Project: 100% Impact Portfolio

Advocacy (Organizational)

Winner: SHARE
Project: Canada’s Modern Slavery Legislation Initiative

Finalist: Ivey Foundation
Project: Building Sustainable Finance Capacity in Canada

Individual Leadership

Winner: Tim Nash
Project: Market Education – Public Awareness

Finalist: Gabriel Flores
Project: Market Education – Leading by example

Our sincere congratulations to the Winners, whose submissions exemplified leading-edge projects, practices and activities that are contributing to the advancement of responsible investment in Canada. Finalists, who received the second-highest scores in their category, are commended for demonstrating excellence in RI with their competitive submissions. We thank all organizations and individuals who made submissions, as they showcased the great breadth of work that has been done and considerable momentum for RI going forward.

The RIA is also very grateful to the Panel of Judges for their diligence, time and commitment to judging the submissions in an unbiased manner.

Process

The 2020 RIA Leadership Awards were launched to recognize RIA members who contributed to the RIA’s Strategic Priorities in Canada in 2019, in three categories:

Market Education: Driving awareness and demand for responsible investments
Integration: Developing RI capacity of investment professionals
Advocacy: Shifting public policy and regulation to support RI

Originally, Organizational and Individual Awards were going to be granted in each category, for a total of 6 Awards. However, due to the number of Individual Awards submissions received, and with the agreement of the individuals affected, RIA (in consultation with the Awards Committee) decided to maintain the three categories for organizational members, and combine the individual members into one category.

We received a total of 19 submissions for the 2020 RIA Leadership Awards during the submission period of January 28th to April 14th, 2020. A detailed breakdown is shown below:

RIA Leadership Award for Market Education – 5 submissions from organizations
RIA Leadership Award for Integration – 8 submissions from organizations
RIA Leadership Award for Advocacy – 3 submissions from organizations
RIA Individual Leadership Award – 3 submissions from individuals

Submissions consisted of a project description, long-form answers to questions in the categories and sub-themes below, and supplementary materials.

Category: Originality

Sub-themes: Ambition, Innovation, Uniqueness

Category: Design & Delivery

Sub-themes: Design, Methodology, Accessibility, Comprehensibility, Success

Category: Influence

Sub-themes: Mainstream, Impact, Momentum

Submissions were assessed by a panel of twelve judges, who scored the submissions independently, with no communication amongst them. Submissions were scored on a scale from 1-5 for each sub-theme listed above, with 5 being the highest score. Judges submitted their scorecards to RIA staff, and staff calculated the average scores for each submission. The maximum possible score was 15. The Winners were those with the highest average score, and the Finalists had the second highest.

Two judges were recused from assessing certain categories due to potential conflicts of interest in accordance with the judging guidelines.

RIA staff reviewed all the judges’ scorecards to look for anomalies or potential signs of bias, and found none. Therefore, RIA staff accepted the judges’ scores without challenging or amending any of the scores. RIA staff had zero influence on the scoring outcomes.

All organizations and individuals who entered a submission for the Awards will receive a copy of their final scorecard, along with the scores of the Winner and Finalist in their category, and the range of scores given for all the submissions in their category. The winners’ and finalists’ scorecards can be found here:

You can find out more information about the Winning Submissions on the Awards page.