Sarah Bernstein

Sarah Bernstein is a Managing Principal and the Head of Sustainability at Meketa Investment Group, an independent, employee-owned institutional investment consulting and OCIO firm. She chairs Meketa's Sustainability Committee, where her mandate is to ensure the firm's investment services address material sustainability risks and opportunities on behalf of its institutional clients. She has roughly two decades of experience as an institutional investment consultant with a specific concentration in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

She joined Meketa in 2019 through the merger of Meketa Investment Group and Pension Consulting Alliance (PCA), the firm she had been with since 2002. At PCA she was a Principal and led the firm's ESG/sustainability practice, advising sophisticated institutional investors on general investment consulting, private equity, and environmental/clean-tech investing. Before entering the consulting world, she worked as a sell-side equity analyst at several Wall Street firms, including Kaufman Bros., First Union Capital Markets Corp., and U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.

Bernstein holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research and carries the Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting (FSA) Credential associated with SASB/IFRS Foundation sustainability-reporting standards. PCA itself was founded in 1988 and merged into Meketa in April 2019, creating a firm advising on roughly $1.8 trillion in client assets, including more than $100 billion in private markets and real estate.

• Works with institutional asset owners to integrate material sustainability risks and opportunities into investment programs, rather than selecting individual startups.
• Emphasizes that ESG integration should ultimately serve returns — the aim is to "encourage and advance sustainable investment practices, transparency and consistency to generate long-term investment returns."
• Deep specialty in environmental / clean-tech investing and in applying sustainability-accounting frameworks (SASB/FSA) to real portfolios across public equity, fixed income, and private equity.
• Champions industry-wide standard-setting and collaboration: she initiated Meketa's involvement in the U.S. Investment Consultants Sustainability Working Group (ICSWG-US), saying Meketa launched the group "inspired by our peers in the UK, to better support our clients in addressing the critical sustainability investment issues of our times."
• Because her role is advisory, "check size" and "target company profile" apply to her clients' mandates rather than to personal deal-making; founders raising seed capital are generally outside her remit.