ESG Is Dead. Faith-Driven Investing Offers a Better Way.

The ESG era is winding down, leaving behind a vacuum and a crucial lesson: impact language without impact infrastructure does not work. Steven Libman, founder of Investing With Purpose, offers a faith-driven alternative that treats community investment as an operating system, not a marketing claim. His firm has spent 15 years building a multifamily investment model where caring is a strategy, not charity. Where ESG promised investors they could do good while making competitive returns but delivered below-benchmark performance and limited verifiable impact, Libman's conviction-based model argues that genuine community investment produces both financial returns and measurable impact. The key difference: ESG treated impact as a cost layered on top of an investment, while Investing With Purpose views community investment as upstream of financial performance. The on-site Purposed Care Initiative (PCI) drives outcomes like lower turnover, improved delinquency, and stronger staff morale. The firm tracks both standard real estate KPIs and Key Care Indicators (KCIs)—metrics like resident events, pastoral care connections, and acts of service—reported to investors alongside financial data. This dual-track accountability structure is something ESG funds never managed to build. With ESG in retreat, Libman sees an opportunity for investors with conviction to fill the gap with biblical stewardship, transparency, and rigorous investment discipline. "We do not want to be ESG with a cross on it," says Libman. "We offer real disciplined investing with real underwriting and real returns, but coupled with real care and real accountability associated with that care."

ESG's failure was structural: it tried to build a universal moral scorecard for a diverse investor base, became political and vague, and allowed fund managers to apply the label inconsistently. Investors had no reliable way to evaluate whether an ESG designation meant anything. For faith-driven investors specifically, ESG outsourced the definition of values to Wall Street. Libman's alternative is not a softer ESG but a different thesis: caring as strategy, not charity. Better communities create better assets, and better assets create better investments. The assumption of a tradeoff—accept lower returns for meaningful impact—was always the flaw in the ESG premise. By building community infrastructure into the asset, not bolting it on, Investing With Purpose aims to produce both returns and impact. Whether this model gains traction beyond faith-driven firms remains to be seen, but the demand for a more rigorous framework is growing.