Realizing Change
Institutional Investor’s DE&I Roundtable in Chicago has recognized 12 industry leaders for their commitment and leadership in forwarding diversity initiatives. Among those so honored was Crewcial Partners’ Director of Diverse Manager Equity, Angela Outlaw-Matheny. Below is the second part of our conversation with her.
Angela received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Baruch College and a Master of Public Administration & Public Affairs from the Metropolitan College of New York. Before joining the consultant, she held various roles across several companies, including the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel. Her last role as Senior Training & Development Specialist started Angela on her current DEI journey.
She has been Director of Investment Staff & Diverse Manager Equity at Crewcial Partners since 2020. Since joining the firm in 2016, she has helped facilitate value alignment across processes, expanding and refining Crewcial’s sourcing efforts for diverse investment managers (defined as having greater than 50% equity ownership of their firms) across asset classes, geography, and gender.
Angela has also helped institute more equitable-friendly policies, such as eliminating the word “minority” in reference to diverse managers to build respect in the community and mitigate unconscious bias in the search for exceptional investment talent.” At Crewcial, Angela has distinguished herself as a leader in diverse manager equity. She was appointed to her current position in January 2020.
Today, the firm manages over $30 billion for largely nonprofit organizations. As of the latest peak in 2021, clients had approximately $4.2 billion allocated to diverse managers. Although a public market decline has led to some fluctuation in this number over time, the work continues with no finish line in sight.
The following remarks have been edited for clarity.
Diversity at the core
Whether or not we allocate to managers, we provide feedback, which helps to build trust, credibility, and transparency. This serves to expand our access to other referred GPs across shared networks, leading to special invitations to small forums and under-the-radar conferences. The intentional deployment of significant amounts of capital can be a powerful catalyst for real change, and this grounds our approach to DEI as core to our investment philosophy.
We never doubted we would find exceptional talent through such networks, leveraging the power of variant perception. We embrace people from all walks of life, as differentiated experiences lead to differentiated perspectives, which is key to outperforming markets. We remain disciplined in our focus to ensure biases do not creep into our engagement and decision-making process.
How do you measure success?
We define a diverse firm as having more than 50% equity ownership by women and/or people of color. Much research points to the benefit of workplace diversity in increasing performance and productivity across industries.
We track diverse managers by asset class, geography, gender, and ethnicity—we also categorize our non-U.S.-domiciled ethnically diverse managers separately from our US-domiciled ethnically diverse managers. We also focus on who is getting access to capital, so our exposure reports for clients can better reflect exactly where money is flowing; this helps us see where more work needs to be done, and our sourcing efforts increase accordingly.
Building an ecosystem
When working with peers, we want to ensure we address both unconscious and confirmation biases that have crept into decision-making across our industry. Whether you’re on the sell side or the buy side, without a diverse team, your decisions will suffer from too much homogeneity. Sometimes the bias is as simple and insidious as ‘I trust you less have because you don’t sound like me.’
We must fundamentally dismantle systematic and structural barriers to build new policies and processes while repositioning ourselves due to cultural competencies some LPs have in building their own diverse teams which leads to how LP and GP relationships are considered. When Crewcial reflects on the philanthropic impact of our clients supported by our investment advice, we’re full of intention through action due to our prioritization of DEI as a firm. It’s important to say we’re not taking a victory lap; much work remains. But for many diverse managers that are not getting access to capital, we are finding ways to accelerate our work to open historically closed doors. Perseverance is the name of the game. It starts with really listening, how authentically LPs show up, and how often does one engage.
For the full list of DEI Award winners, visit Allocator Intel here.
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