 It was such a treat to have Heidi and Sally here and this lineup in the afternoon is filled with speakers that come from every range of this market and I just feel so privileged that we get to be here at Socap and all of these amazing people doing the leading work in this field come to this main stage. About a month ago, when our program was totally set, I got a call from someone proposing a speaker and I couldn't find a way to say no because I think this is so interesting. Our next speaker is the treasurer of the city of Chicago. Kurt Summers is responsible for managing an $8 billion investment portfolio and is implementing the most comprehensive ESG investing initiative from any city in the country. They're working to integrate ESG considerations into 100% of their investment decisions. They're becoming the first city in the world to commit to the UN PRI and they're the first city to commit to a carbon neutral investment portfolio. San Francisco is a pretty progressive city but this is really impressive and Treasurer Summers is doing even more to invest for impact but I'm going to let him tell you about it himself. Please welcome to the stage Chicago Treasurer Kurt Summers. Good afternoon and thank you to Socap for having me. My name's Kurt Summers and I just want to tell you a story. It's a story about discovery and the discovery of the amazing power that we have in this country in untapped assets that can be leveraged to do good and have impact around the world. Now typically when someone's telling a story like this, this kind of parable, there's a great heroic figure that has a discovery of their own power and you might see a story that includes a biblical character like David or Moses or a historic character like Lincoln or Churchill. I decided to have some fun today and the hero and the protagonist of this story is going to be a cartoon character, He-Man. How many of you guys know who He-Man was? Okay there are a few kids who were born in the 70s and 80s you might know who He-Man is. Well those of you who don't, the story of He-Man is quite interesting and it parallels our own story and what we're dealing with in the United States and in municipal governments, cities, states, counties around the country today. This person you see here is Prince Adam. This is the story of He-Man. Prince Adam was obviously royalty, he was humble, didn't have a lot of faith in himself, didn't believe that he had the power to defend the kingdom and one day he pulled out the sword that he had with him always, this asset that he carried around and discovered its power and realized that through the power of this asset and believing and saying four simple words, I have the power and cherishing this asset of this sword, he became He-Man, the greatest purveyor of good in the world. So clearly I spent a lot of Saturday mornings growing up watching cartoons but He-Man for me represented a fantasy growing up on the south side of Chicago in a different world that said if I could believe that I had the power I could change my environment, if I had the tools and the assets I could be He-Man and I could do that kind of good in the world and today's story is about how Chicago in the last several years has gone from in this transformation from being Prince Adam to He-Man and what that might mean for all of you. The first question I want to answer for you is why should you care? Why does this matter? Why should you care about municipal treasurers, cities, states, counties, and how can that impact your life and the lives of millions of people around the world? Well the first is that municipal treasurers are massive asset owners and managers. In the United States, state and local treasurers manage more than $3.1 trillion in assets. This does not include retirement plans. A lot of focus in where we invest our capital is focused on pension plans and retirement plans. These are boring municipal treasury assets that no one focuses on. $3.1 trillion of them are sitting in state, city, and county coffers around this country. More than that number of $3.1 trillion, let me tell you what's in that portfolio. It's all short duration fixed income assets that are meant to serve as reserves for states and cities, fund liquidity and cash flow, not necessarily the source of change and innovation. What's important about that, though, is that the fixed income market where these $3.1 trillion of assets is 11 times the size of the equities market. Short-term fixed income, five years or less in these portfolios, is more than 60% of all fixed income traded in the world. So these sleepy little assets that sit in counties, cities, towns, villages, state pools all around the country are the single largest driver and requested source of capital for every company around the world. There's power beyond that number. It is the most sought after source of capital, more than an IPO, more than private equity, more than hedge fund capital. The second reason why you're here and you should care about this is that I believe and we can show you that municipal treasurers and local government officials can be sources of innovation. A, ideally, our missions are aligned. We're here for the public good. But also, we don't have the same competitive market dynamic that says we can't share trade secrets. We can't collaborate. In fact, it's our job to. We are an open book and our charge is to be transparent. This is a petri dish for innovation and for experimentation. So let me take you back a few years. About four years ago, I became the treasurer of the city of Chicago. And when I came in, I looked at our asset a little bit like He-Man Sword. It was rusty. It needed to be sharpened and shined and polished. And there were basic things that we had to do consistent with our fiduciary obligation if we were ever going to get any real value, any real power out of nearly $8 billion of assets. To that end, there were four major things that we tackled. The first, we modernized technology. So I'm 39 years old. Four years ago, I was 35. That math works, right? I'm a treasurer. And the trading system, the IT system that we used was 37 years old. So in an area of high-frequency trading, global markets that are transacting at the millisecond, we were using 37-year-old technology to represent taxpayers to invest on behalf of everyday citizens. We changed the investment policy, which hadn't been updated since the global financial crisis, to adjust for risk and diversification. We implemented innovative investment strategies. Or maybe you wouldn't think they're so innovative. Things like forecasting and liquidity and risk management. And of course, we improved human capital. And we have a phenomenal team in Chicago watching right now of great people that helped us unlock the power of this portfolio. And we invested in their training and their recruitment and retention. That was us taking our responsibility. The result was amazing and outsized by almost any benchmark. Our portfolio became increasingly diversified. We lowered duration while increasing yield. We increased our earnings almost two-and-a-half-fold while decreasing the potential losses on our books from legacy issues from my predecessors. This is like the holy grail. As you might imagine, very, very sexy when you want to talk to reporters about it in a town like Chicago, right? But this is the work that we had to do, the polishing of our assets, the sharpening of the sword, to prepare ourselves to take advantage of the opportunity that we saw in front of us. Once we were able to do that and we took the responsibility as fiduciaries with this traditional approach to investing, we built the internal capability and the external credibility to be able to take on and transform a comprehensive approach to investing and investing with impact. That approach had two major pillars. The first was to deliver results locally. And the second was to drive the conversation globally. We have to, you know, as they say, all politics are local. We sort of had to bring home the bacon locally. We launched the first of its kind local investment fund by a city, by a municipality in the country. We've invested in the last six months more than $50 million in local projects through these sleepy little securities and things like senior housing, affordable housing, public housing, small business loans, infrastructure. And one of the things that was most sort of personal to me, we made the largest deposit in the history of the last black-owned bank in the state of Illinois. A state that has more bank charters than any state in the union. And for 80 years, hadn't had this deposit and was on the brink of collapse. Now, they've had their first profitable year in a decade, and they're investing in the community that I grew up in. A community that is three times the unemployment rate and a poverty rate of nearly one third. Globally, we had four pillars to how we would invest in the world's future. The first, as was mentioned, we became the first city treasury to become a signatory to the United Nations principles for responsible investing. Now, it would seem to reason that this isn't a heavy lift. It's a reporting and data effort, but it speaks to the values of your capital. We also made the commitment to have a carbon neutral portfolio by 2030. And in the last 45 days have made tremendous progress with more than $30 million of green bonds invested in that period of time. We implemented the first of its kind. Minimum ESG investment grade for the entire portfolio. But now I want to spend a little time on the thing I think that we did and have done that is most impactful and most representative of how Chicago transformed from Prince Adam to He-Man. We built our own bespoke model to score every single security in our entire investable universe and provide its own ESG score unique to us. We looked at over 2000 variables by every data provider in the world, narrowed that down to 800 that we would evaluate on two measures. Does it impact risk adjusted return? And is it consistent with our values? As we did that, we narrowed it down to 200 variables that built an algorithm that scores every single security that we might even contemplate investing in. That means that there isn't a case where bad actors will continue to get rewarded. And there isn't a case where good actors who are having positive impacts won't get rewarded with more capital. I was in New York yesterday at the council of institutional investors. And I sat on a panel with a woman named Tasha. And Tasha is a teamster in Memphis. And she's a courageous woman who shared her story about sexual harassment, workplace discrimination, retaliation and despicable treatment of women in this plant of a $12 billion public company. Thankfully, her and four other courageous women blew the whistle. And they came forward with the press. And for those of you who were interested, there was a large profile in last Sunday's New York Times. This is a $12 billion public company that last year had 11 separate EEOC violations. They've had four women have miscarriages on their shop floor. They've had they've had women who have been carried out from heat exhaustion during their pregnancy. Women who are mistreated every day from the time they step in the door and the way that they look, they're cackled at as they go to the restroom. Just despicable working environments. Yesterday after we laid out what we do with our $8 billion portfolio and how no company like that would ever get a dime of capital from us, this strong courageous woman came up to me yesterday with tears in her eyes after this panel and thanked me for my courage. Thank me for not continuing to reward bad behavior. Look, I'm an investor. I'm an elected official. I'm a bean counter. But that's the reason why we do this work. Since, thank you, to put a finer point on this and why everyone should care as a fiduciary. In the last month, since these women went public, and we've had down markets, the Dow's been down about 5% in the last month. This company has been down 25% in the last month on the back of these disclosures of women for the last several years coming forward. This has a direct impact on share price, a direct impact on the value of our portfolios, and it has a direct impact on our fiduciary obligation. To not consider these issues is an absolution of our fiduciary duty. So here's what that means for all of us. First, the situation is that we know that this massive pool of capital is out there. The challenge is that most municipal treasurers, city, states, counties don't have access to the talent and they don't have resources and support. And it's up to everyone in this audience to advocate, agitate, and keep accountable in your home cities, towns, villages, and states. Second, I think we've proven with our model that you don't need to take a sliver of your portfolio, make a portion of your portfolio and invest in the things that you think matter or represent risks or consistent with your values. It can and should be done consistently with 100% of your portfolio. It's not about what you want to divest from, it's what you stand for and what you believe impacts you. We all have the power in this room and together if we take this framework to our organizations and to our places of dwelling, we can all find the he-man inside of us to change the world. Thank you.