Meredith Jenkins, Chief Investment Officer of Trinity Church New York City, discusses how the Episcopal parish manages its endowment to support over a thousand congregants and local community programs on the Lower East Side. She explains that the endowment serves as the sole funding source for all church activities and emphasizes the importance of portfolio diversification through marketable alternatives, hedge funds, and private credit. Jenkins highlights their strategy of seeking managers with different return drivers from public equity markets to provide protection and stable payment streams in various market conditions, while ensuring alignment with the church’s values.
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Trinity Church relies on its endowment as the sole source of funding for its ministries, community programs, youth initiatives, and support for organizations throughout Lower Manhattan, making long-term portfolio stability essential to its mission.
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Hedge funds, private credit, and other marketable alternatives provide diversified sources of return beyond public equity markets, helping protect the endowment and deliver more consistent funding across different market environments.
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By investing with managers whose strategies have different return drivers than traditional stock markets, Trinity Church can maintain a stable stream of support for congregants, local communities, and charitable programs during both strong and challenging economic periods.
Transcript:
Trinity Church is a very vibrant congregation. We have well over a thousand active congregants. But the core of what we do is support our local neighborhood, youth who are in high schools, around our buildings, the local organizations and neighborhoods on the Lower East Side and throughout the downtown New York. I am Meredith Jenkins.
I’m the Chief Investment Officer for Trinity Church New York City, which is a thriving Episcopal parish in downtown Manhattan. The endowment is the sole source of funds for all of the church’s activities. We have historically had a substantial real estate allocation and then more recently a diversified portfolio that’s relatively largely endowed. I am a huge believer in marketable alternatives, hedge funds, private credit, you know, the whole sort of menu of options in providing diversification to portfolio.
Hedge funds and market alternatives are vital for the church’s endowment because they provide protection. They provide different sources of economic return to the portfolio outside just public markets. Being able to have a well diversified portfolio that allows you to have a fairly stable payment stream from it is really important. We look for managers who have very different return drivers than just public equity markets.
First is, is it providing attractive risk return to the portfolio? Secondarily, are the managers, are they aligned with us from a values perspective? And knowing environments where the market may be bumpier, that we have managers who might perform very differently and help to protect the portfolio. We’re thinking about having a well diversified endowment that can meet all needs in both strong and weak market environments.
