Andrew Rodriguez has spent more than a decade proving that money can be invested differently — to align with what people value, and to make change in the world.
He has built his career around a second thing as well: making that work understandable to people who are new to it. Most investors who care about the world have been told for thirty years that acting on it means giving something up. Undoing that, and replacing it with genuine understanding and confidence, is the part of this work he is best at.
In 2016 he co-founded Change Finance and served as its co-chief executive and chief investment officer. The firm was built to answer a question the industry kept dodging: if you strip out the harm, does the portfolio still work? Change Finance grew from nothing to more than $130 million in assets, raised over $6 million in private capital, and drew allocations from institutions managing billions. Its flagship fund set out to democratize impact investing in public markets — to make a rigorous, fully divested portfolio available to ordinary investors rather than only to institutions.
The fund was a genuine set of firsts. Andrew led the firm through all of them.
He also convened the people doing this work. The forum he founded and hosted brought practitioners, fund managers, and thought leaders into open conversation with an audience of roughly 30,000 — several times a week, for two years — and much of what he learned about how to explain this work came from doing it live, in front of people who had never heard any of it before.
Renew exists to do that work directly, with a small number of families.
Outside of the work, Andrew spends his time with his son. He lives in Northern California and hikes the Sierras and the old-growth redwood forests that first taught him what is worth protecting.