The era of ESG investing is coming to an end, according to Steven Libman, founder of Investing With Purpose™. The environmental, social, and governance label, once championed by institutional investors, has been politically retreating, commercially discredited, and abandoned. In its wake, Libman sees a vacuum and a lesson: impact language without impact infrastructure does not work, and investors who bought the label without examining the substance paid for both failures.
Libman’s firm has spent 15 years building a faith-driven multifamily investment model where community impact is not a marketing claim but an operating system. He argues that ESG asked the right question—reminding investors that investing is not neutral—but answered it badly. “It made people start to realize – oh, my investment matters,” says Libman. “It is not just a neutral act.” However, the execution collapsed under structural contradictions.
The failure was structural, according to Libman. ESG tried to build a universal moral scorecard for a diverse investor base with fundamentally different values, becoming political and vague. Fund managers applied the label inconsistently, and investors had no reliable way to evaluate whether an ESG designation meant anything at all. “You could really slap an ESG label on almost anything,” says Libman. “But where was the measurable impact?” Returns confirmed the problem, delivering below-benchmark performance and limited verifiable impact. For faith-driven investors, ESG outsourced the definition of values to Wall Street. “Faith-driven investors do not need Wall Street to tell them what is good,” says Libman.
The alternative Libman describes treats community investment as upstream of financial performance. His firm’s on-site Purposed Care Initiative (PCI) drives measurable outcomes: turnover falls when residents feel cared for, delinquency improves, reputation scores rise, and staff morale strengthens. “Caring is not charity,” says Libman. “It is a strategy. Better communities create better assets, and better assets create better investments.”
Unlike ESG, which asked investors to trade returns for impact, the conviction-based model argues that genuine community investment produces both. Libman’s firm tracks standard real estate KPIs monthly and has developed Purposed Care Indicators (PCIs): metrics tracking resident events, pastoral care connections, and acts of service. These are reported alongside financial data, creating dual-track accountability that ESG funds never managed to build. “We do not want to be ESG with a cross on it,” says Libman. “We offer real disciplined investing with real underwriting and real returns, but coupled with real care and real accountability.”
With ESG in retreat, Libman believes investors with conviction, not consultants with acronyms, should fill the gap. The better framework involves biblical stewardship, transparency, purposed impact, and excellent investment discipline—with community infrastructure built into the asset. Whether this gains traction beyond faith-driven firms remains to be seen, but the demand for more rigorous impact measurement is growing.
