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Note from the editor: For Earth Day 2019, the team at VFG is celebrating with a week full of activities and consciousness around what it means to care about the environment. While our wheelhouse is in investments that focus on having a positive impact in the world, we are also a team of people who live our personal lives congruent with our professional ones. This week we’ll feature a series of blog posts dedicated to Earth Week.

Earth Week Feature: Conscious Energy Usage

There is a desperate need for consumers to become more conscious of their energy usage and to use that awareness to reduce their impact on the environment.

For 2019, we're celebrating Earth Day over a full week of festivities and service. In service to our mission as a firm, we want to be the most impactful we can while aligning ourselves with the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. We believe this includes investing with a specific purpose around environmental and social issues as well as offering up our service and our volunteer time to issues we deeply care about. 

At Vanderbilt Financial Group, we've made a name for ourselves in the industry as "The Sustainable Broker Dealer", one of a very few that is dedicated to making a positive impact on the world. We've built into our systems to leverage technology in an effort to make Vanderbilt a more impactful company and increase our sustainability efforts, whether that's through our solar panels and state-of-the-art utility systems in our LEED Certified Platinum Headquarters in Long Island or through the online, cloud based management systems our advisors employ in their practice everyday. 

On Christmas Day 50 years ago, America was a divided nation. It was a tough year of troubled times and assassinations. We lost Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the Vietnam War was in full swing with massive rampant protests. I can see the parallels between the issues we dealt with during that difficult year of 1968 and today, including moments and opportunities to bring us back together.

Is it actually possible to create investments that offer impact while at the same time returning market-rate financial returns? We interviewed Gloria Nelund of TriLinc Global, an investment sponsor with the mission of doing exactly that.