Lori Van Dusen On Addressing Health And Education Inequality Through Impact-Led Finance

Lori Van Dusen, CIMA, is the Founder and CEO of LVW Advisors, a Rochester, New York-based registered investment advisory firm that serves wealthy families and individuals, as well as nonprofit institutions nationwide.

An advocate of client-focused strategies for more than 25 years, she has become the voice of reason for providing unbiased integrated solutions in a fragmented financial services industry. Lori is passionate about numerous philanthropic causes, serving on several boards focused on urban education, health and wellness, and the fine arts.

Lori has recently received numerous accolades, including being ranked #1 on the Forbes 2022 Best-In-State Wealth Advisors list for New York and #1 on the Forbes 2022 Best-In-State Women Wealth Advisors list for New York. A member of the Barron’s Financial Advisor Hall of Fame, she consistently appears on the annual Top 100 Women Financial Advisors and Top 1,200 Financial Advisors lists.

Lori discusses how social entrepreneurs can manage their finances to fuel social impact and why philanthropy plays a vital role in helping disadvantaged communities.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in social enterprise?

[Lori Van Dusen] - I've had an interesting path. I am in the finance industry, but none of my formal degrees are in finance. I was raised by a single mother and my grandparents, and I think you could say that my grandfather was very ahead of his time in the way he thought. He was a first generation American, and he was my father figure. He had an eighth-grade education and somehow throughout my childhood and teenage years he exposed me to a lot of things, including finance. I ended up in my early twenties in a training program in the World Trade Centre with one of the largest and most prestigious Wall Street firms. I didn't think I was any different than anybody else. I didn't think I necessarily didn't belong there; I just didn’t think I was really entitled to anything special. When I was in my thirties, I was considered a nationally successful financial advisor and worked mainly in New York City but lived outside of city in upstate New York. I was asked by the New York State Governor at the time if I would consider a position in a very large local community college as a member of their board. In New York (and this is not true across the entirety of the United States necessarily), you can actually be appointed to these boards for public institutions. I researched it a little bit as I had no experience with public colleges or universities, and I took a leap of faith and thought that it was an honour to be asked.

I agreed to be interviewed by the Governor and his office, and I was ultimately appointed to this large community college that served a lot of students from disadvantaged circumstances including poverty, poor quality of high school education and family challenges. These students had so much stacked against them, and I got very involved in the college and advocation outside of my profession. I became Vice Chair, then Chair of the board and over the years the board has been really involved with student initiatives and scholarships. Just for a little bit of background, community colleges here are sometimes called technical colleges or by other names, but they vary in terms of academic offerings. I think in Australia it's a similar set up, there are a lot of comprehensive two-year institutions that provide pathways for students to transfer to a four-year college to get an associate degree, liberal arts degree, STEM related degree, technical education or nursing qualifications. That was my first avenue towards really understanding systemic issues.

I think part of being a social entrepreneur is just being enlightened, because we all live in our own circumstances. Unless we are introduced to people that have been raised really differently and we try to understand the root cause of their problems, we can never solve them.

That was my first experience with tackling social issues, but I'm still very involved in community colleges and think they're one of the most important institutions in America (in terms of giving disadvantaged students access to education). There's a lot I could say about that, but that's the shortest answer to how I got involved in social impact.

Lori, you're the founder and CEO of LVW Advisors, so could you please share more about this organisation's purpose and how it supports non-profit organisations and social enterprises?

We are a full service financial advisory firm. I previously mentioned that I started in a large Wall Street firm in New York city and the World Trade Centre. In 2008, right before the Global Financial Crisis, I brought my team of people into my own practice or business. Now I'd like to think of it as an enterprise because I feel it's going forward to the next generation and we have long given advice to not just families, but also to not-for-profit institutions. I would segment them into a few areas; education, health, wellness and the arts. I have personally been involved in many organisations around access to education, health, equity, wellness, and the arts for everyone in a community, not just one of those specific segments. Our business advises these organisations not just on their investment pools of capital, but also on their financial health and donor base. We integrate financial advice into the organisation’s health and the constituents that they serve. That really is a synergy and alignment with what we believe and the clients that we serve, and where we in my case certainly spent a lot of my personal time and money as well. We advise I think roughly twenty-six organisations that fall in those broad categories, but I personally serve on a lot of different boards around those areas as well.

What practices would you recommend for start-up founders and changemakers to manage their finances more effectively to continue operating their businesses?

Sustainability (however you define it) means to stay in business. Doing this with a sound business plan is a good starting point. Understanding what the operating environment is, how it may change in the foreseeable future and what differentiates you from your competitors is crucial. But in the end, I think that I have been successful because I sought to solve a problem that other people and organisations weren't solving. In fact, in my industry, there were a lot of conflicts of interests that may have served the businesspeople but not the end constituent or client. I've long fought a lot of conflicts of interest and wanted to provide a more seamless and integrated advice model that was objective, which really didn't exist when I started.

I think the point is that for anyone, what you're really trying to do is figure out how to meet a need better, more effectively and compassionately. I think if you do that, you'll have met the first requirements of operating sustainably.

The advice I guess would be that every time you're thinking about starting a business or you're in the beginning stages of a business, you really have to seek out people that you respect (maybe they're even competitors) and get advice, feedback and take it to heart because criticism is really important. Making sure you fine tune what you're doing, and you are meeting unmet needs is crucial, and at the same time you have to balance what we call a ‘P&L’, revenue costs and expenses continually. I do think sustainability whatever way we look at it, whether we mean being able to live another day or being a social entrepreneur at the same time you're running a business, I think is about meeting needs better, more effectively and compassionately.

What role do you believe philanthropy plays in society and where are there more opportunities to amplify the change these organisations create?

With philanthropy, my firsthand experience is that it's very important because government just can't address the needs of all causes. If you get a group of people together and are focused and targeted, you can more easily solve some of the biggest issues that are present in many communities in the world. There is this sentiment that philanthropy is contagious and it's really true.

I think you can take a relatively small amount of people and make a big difference. Governments are great, but there's a lot of problems and bureaucracy. Philanthropy can help fill the gap.

In terms of making a bigger impact, I sit on a board created by the University of Rochester. It's an academic medical centre (based on the work by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), and I sit on a committee of that board. Its focus is health equity and answering how do we have an impact in the community around the vast differences in health-based outcomes due to where someone comes from, their socioeconomic class or what neighbourhoods they live in? It's shocking the difference in mortality between one zip code or small area of a city, and another just based on nutrition, poverty level, safe housing and education. It's one of the areas that I care a lot about and I'm just thankful that a committee has been created to look at the root causes of different health outcomes in communities. Our goal is to understand them and remove the obstacles so that people feel more empowered, trust the health systems more, and are able to really impact the outcomes. It's a grassroots effort where we started with the residents, and the young people have made a commitment to the medical field starting with curriculum. Integrating this knowledge into the traditional curriculum is super impactful and amplifying. If more and more health systems that help people every day around health, nutrition, wellness and housing issues were more focused on adopting the basic knowledge of people on the front lines (whether they're doctors, surgeons, nurses or healthcare providers), this information could have a huge impact in the future.

That's one thing I'm really thankful that I'm involved in, and I think from a big picture perspective is one of the biggest issues we have in the world. I also think we talked about community access to education, and I do feel strongly that government officials and the public should give these free community and technical college education programs a closer look. In New York for example, the funding of community college is inadequate.

If we looked at the people whose lives are turned around by a two-year degree or technical certificate and the people they then impact and what happens to communities over time, we would probably be putting more resources towards these community colleges and educational programs.

We can address some of the huge systemic disparities we have in the United States and across the world. Education is really one of the ultimate equalisers and the stories are incredible. There is a lot of progress happening, but these two movements are really on my radar, the first being health equity and how you make a difference. If you think about a large health system, if you could just take an inventory of all of the organisations interact with and then understand how you can make an impact around health equity, the system would be less wasteful, more efficient and provide better outcomes. Furthermore, any organisation dealing with health and wellness, nutrition and safe housing should be partnering with health systems to create equity. The other opportunity is access to free education, but also making sure that the community colleges and public institutions serving these students have the resources they need.

What trends have you identified for entrepreneurs to create a social impact through utilising their wealth and making financial investments?

The big term is ESG, Environmental, Social, and Governance investing. That term has been around for a while, but it's gained a lot of momentum in our space because we deal with not-for-profits, education, healthcare and the arts. I always have loved working in these spaces because they're ahead of everybody else, and they've long realised you can invest with certain managers or in companies that care about their constituents deeply. Furthermore, you can still make money, and in fact more money in some cases. I think it's being embraced more, and as long-term investors we seek to understand the competitive dynamics that will play out over a lot of years.

It has been long recognised that with a company we invest in, their impact on stakeholders (meaning employees, customers, the environment and broader communities in which they operate) can create financial opportunities as well as risks.

Understanding and investing around that ESG framework is becoming more adopted, and I would say we have been investing that way in our portfolios for a long time. It used to be that the buzzword was 'socially responsible', which just meant excluding things you thought were harmful to the environment in your portfolio or were in a certain category, and now it's really around how do you create change and what financial implications are related to things like climate change, biodiversity, social inequities or global health? Companies that harm stakeholders eventually will face negative results. It may not be immediately, but ultimately over time you have increased operating costs, a higher cost of capital and a loss of trust. Those all can be damaging for businesses, so there is this alignment now (and I feel we've long recognised and invested in companies that care about this) getting much greater attention and more momentum. Again, it used to be just about what do we avoid investing in and how do we embrace ‘social responsibility’? Now it's questioning how we make a difference and have successful outcomes in our portfolios?

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

There's an organisation called Breakthrough New York which is basically a community for motivated students. These are good students who want to graduate from college. They have a ten-year tuition-free program that provides students from low-income backgrounds with opportunities, resources, and mentorship to succeed in rigorous schools or careers. It's grounded in three breakthroughs, the first being enrichment, so to address this they have summer and after-school programs. (The second is) access, especially to high quality schools. To assist with this, they coach students and families through the complex submission processes for high schools and colleges which is really key. Then the third breakthrough is relationships.

It's a students teaching students’ model, and this is in the New York City area, but they train over 130 college students to teach programming and serve as mentors and admission coaches.

The second organisation I'd recommend following is the SUNY Impact Fund. I came across this organisation and thought it was incredible. I couldn't believe it was actually real, I had to check it out with several tax advisors. It's a charitable tax credit program that has an extraordinary impact on students that attend public colleges and universities in New York. I mentioned my work and involvement with community colleges earlier, but I learned that you could make a qualified contribution to this impact foundation, and this is the New York state SUNY Impact Foundation. That contribution could be designated to any state university or community college. If I give X amount of dollars, I can receive an 85% income tax credit, so I thought this is amazing and really out of the box thinking. Furthermore, it’s communicating the issue and getting people to be motivated. It is really impactful on the community college that I mentioned earlier where I served as the chair of the board and am now the chair of the foundation. Then, Monroe Community College has an initiative that was started by a women's giving circle. I was a part of that, and we named it Star Power. It was inspired by a generous initial challenge and a bunch of donors for the Monroe Community College Foundation. The board of directors launched this scholarship in 2013 to raise money to support single parents pursuing their education at a community college, and more specifically in this case Monroe Community College. We realised that the dropout rate of single parents was much higher than for the average student. You can just use common sense to understand why that would be! We created a scholarship (starting in 2013) and it's just grown over the years.

We've awarded 63 scholarships so far, and it's a really incredible way to see a student succeed when just the smallest things can derail the completion of their college career. Scholarships are super important, and I thought that when we started this, it was based on my background and being raised by a single mother, so I realised how important this was.

To finish off, are there any books or resources you would recommend to our listeners?

Earlier you asked a question about sustainability, and I think that there are a lot of reasons small businesses fail. A long time ago I came across this book which has been revisited and updated called The E-Myth. It's a Michael Gerber book and it's worth the read. If you are a small businessperson and want to sustain yourself, it's one of my old tried and true resources. It really did change the way I thought about my business and how I could sustain, grow it and make it thrive through to the next generation. In terms of philanthropy, there's a book which isn’t new called The Art Of Giving: Where the Soul Meets a Business Plan. I found it to be really helpful and it probably makes a lot of sense given your questions about philanthropy. Finally, I just tend to read everything Malcolm Gladwell writes, he is brilliant and has certainly helped me in many situations.