Joseph Boateng

Joseph Boateng is the Chief Investment Officer of Casey Family Programs, the Seattle-based national foundation focused on foster care and child welfare. He joined in January 2007 as Casey's first CIO and oversees the foundation's endowment, which has grown to roughly $2.9 billion. In that role he leads a small investment team and advises the Board of Trustees on the prudent investment of foundation assets.

Before Casey, Boateng spent more than a decade building an institutional-investing career at large corporations. He worked for about 13 years at Xerox in various divisions on both coasts, including its pension/trust investment group (under Myra Drucker), where he was part of a team managing roughly $10 billion in assets — and completed a full-time MBA at UCLA during his time in Los Angeles. He later did consulting work with KPMG in Europe (finance and structured products) before joining Johnson & Johnson's pension operations around 2002, where he served on the J&J Investment Committee overseeing more than $17 billion in employee-benefit assets worldwide.

Boateng was born and educated in Ghana, earning a B.S. from the University of Ghana in 1987 (after which he joined AIESEC in Brussels), an MBA from UCLA in 1991, and is an alumnus of the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. He holds the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA), and Personal Financial Specialist (PFS) designations.

Beyond Casey, he is active across institutional-investing governance. He has chaired the Investment Advisory Committee for the Seattle City Employees' Retirement System and served on The Seattle Foundation's Investment Committee, the Advisory Council of the African Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (AVCA), and the boards of the Lumina Foundation, Nuveen/TIAA-CREF Funds, the Freedom Fund, the Africa Institutional Investors Council, and Waterside School.

• Operates as an institutional limited partner / endowment allocator, not a direct angel or seed investor — capital is deployed largely through external fund managers across multiple asset classes.
• Targets a long-term real return of roughly inflation + 5% (~7.25% nominal) to sustain the foundation's mission.
• Allocates approximately 15% to private equity, including about 3% dedicated to Africa, reflecting a long-term bet on the continent's demographics ("1.25 billion population, 60% under age 25").
• Favors concentrated, high-conviction positions and independent thinking: *"If you have a US bias like most American investors you won't get much criticism. But I can't beat the crowd if I'm just following the crowd."*
• Global, manager-agnostic mandate — *"ride the best horses, wherever we find them"* — with opportunistic exposure across Asia, the Middle East, and South America.
• Strong, explicit commitment to diversity in capital allocation: over 35% of Casey's assets are managed by women and diverse managers, a stance that earned recognition on Blueprint Capital Advisors' DEIC Power100 list.
• Emphasizes deep, granular due diligence — examining underlying portfolio holdings rather than relying on a manager's brand or reputation.