For decades, faith-based investing has meant little more than avoiding stocks in tobacco, alcohol, and adult entertainment. But Steven Libman, founder of Investing with Purpose, calls this approach a defining failure of the industry. After 15 years in finance, Libman has built a multifamily real estate investment platform structured explicitly around faith-driven principles, arguing that screening is merely the floor and intentional building is the ceiling.
“The definition that the industry has been operating under for the last 30 years is a lazy one,” Libman said. “Screening is the floor. Building intentionally would be the ceiling.” The distinction matters because in an investment landscape where capital allocation increasingly reflects values, the gap between genuine alignment and surface-level compliance is widening. Investors who cannot tell the difference risk outsourcing their conscience to people who may not share their priorities, Libman argues.
The core premise behind intentional faith-based investing is that every dollar is a vote. Whether invested in a multifamily property, a bond fund, or a private equity vehicle, those dollars fund something. Libman poses a simple but disorienting question to prospective investors: if your grandchildren inherited your portfolio tomorrow, what would it tell them about what you believed in? He recalls asking an audience, “If you turned your portfolio over to your pastor, is there anything in there you might feel embarrassed about?” He emphasizes the goal is not to convict but to provoke different thinking because most people have not been taught to consider their portfolio in this way.
The conventional wisdom in personal finance is to separate investment returns from values and then deploy returns philanthropically. Libman counters that this creates an unnecessary bifurcation: why fund something misaligned with your values to generate returns you then donate to causes that reflect them? He attributes this premise to a financial services industry built on product sales, not values architecture.
The cautionary tale is the ESG sector. Environmental, social, and governance funds marketed themselves on the promise of impact investing but often delivered weak returns. “ESG put a dagger in the heart of values-aligned investing,” Libman said. “They were saying, you are going to get lower returns, but we will make an impact. In fact, they were not making an impact, and they were not making a return either.” A recent study tracking ESG fund performance put total average returns well behind conventional benchmarks. For Libman, the lesson is not that values and returns are incompatible but that funds using impact as a marketing hook rather than an operational framework deliver on neither.
Operators who have built genuine values alignment into their structure, not as a label but as an operating philosophy, have found that strong performance and principled investing are not in conflict. The data increasingly makes that case, Libman argues.
The specific mechanism through which Investing with Purpose generates community outcomes is an on-site asset ministry program embedded in its multifamily properties. Free apartments are provided to on-site ministry staff who run tenant engagement programming such as movie nights, farmers markets, food truck events, and hospital visits for residents in need. The business logic is not incidental: tenants who have six or seven friends within the same complex are 45 percent less likely to move out, according to Libman. Lower turnover means lower vacancy, lower unit-refresh costs, and more stable cash flow. The ministry program functions as a retention and community-building mechanism with compounding economic effects.
“Ministry is the moat around the investment,” Libman said. “When people say impact is going to decrease returns, we think the opposite is true. Caring is a durable business advantage, not a disadvantage.” The faith dimension is present but not imposed; residents are not required to participate in religious programming or share the operators’ values. The mission is expressed through behavior rather than doctrine.
One practical measure of whether a faith-based investment firm operates with real alignment or surface-level branding is the quality of its reporting. Libman’s firm sends investors not only standard financial KPIs but also a ministry impact report tracking how many residents were connected with community programming, how many received pastoral support, and how many on-site acts of care and service were recorded. Investors are also invited on-site quarterly for serve days, allowing direct engagement with the asset and the community it houses.
“Unlike your Wall Street investments, you can drive by it, touch it, feel it, actually see the impact that we are making, and actually be a part of that impact as well,” Libman said. This transparency stands in contrast to the opacity that characterizes much of the ESG sector, where fund methodologies are often difficult to evaluate and impact claims difficult to verify.
For investors who have not considered aligning portfolios with values, Libman’s framing is deliberately non-threatening. Real estate is a familiar asset class, and housing is a fundamental need. The question becomes not whether to invest in real estate, but what kind of operator and structure best reflects your principles. The faith-based label is not a constraint on returns but a signal about operational philosophy, community orientation, and long-term relationships.
“We want to define it as, what are we building?” Libman said. “Every dollar that you invest is a vote for something. So when you deploy your capital, it is either going to build something you are aligned with or something that might be in conflict with your own values.” In an era where investors are increasingly asking harder questions about where their money goes, that framing is less niche than it might have seemed a decade ago.
