Sustainable Investing Course (Totally Free From the Pros!)

Tom Scrivana

Last Updated: 12/31/2021

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A Guide to Sustainable Investing

There is a lot of information on the internet. It can sometimes be hard to know where to turn for good, quality information about ESG investing.

I found a great free sustainable investing course that I thought was well worth sharing. This article is going to give you a brief overview of the sustainable investing course that was created just for you by the pros!

Why This Is Important

One of the reasons I started a blog and YouTube channel is because I found there wasn’t a lot of information out there for people who are interested in ESG investing.

The information that is out there seemed to be designed for investment professionals. Most of this content is filled with overly-complicated financial jargon that almost seems like it was meant to scare non-professionals away.

The goal of The ESG Investor is to create awareness for environmental, social, and governance investing and to build a community that is dedicated to sharing this knowledge and growing together.

I found a great free online course that I wanted to share with all of you. This course was designed specifically for non-professionals and I thought it was a really great resource for those that are relatively new to ESG and sustainable investing and are interested in learning more.

Who Is US SIF?

This course is brought to you by US SIF. This is the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment. US SIF is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “rapidly shift investment practices towards sustainability, focusing on long-term investment and the generation of positive social and environmental impact”.

This organization does a lot of research centered around environmental, social, and governance focused investing. They are probably best known for the research paper they publish on ESG investing trends every two years. They offer a few different online educational courses and they organize a pretty big ESG investing conference every year.

The Free Course

US SIF offers a free course about ESG investing called “Sustainable Investing: An Introductory Course for Individual Investors”.

You can find this course right here. This is not an affiliate link. This article was not sponsored and no one paid me to promote this course. I just think this is a valuable resource for anyone looking to get started with ESG Investing.

It was designed for regular people who are interested in sustainable and ESG investing. It teaches the basics of ESG investing and shows you how you can create an investment portfolio that allows you to meet your financial goals while following your beliefs and values.

This is a pretty short course and took me only about 20 minutes to finish.

Course Content

You probably could have guessed based on the title of the course but it’s an introduction to sustainable investing. It starts with the very basics and goes over the concepts of ESG and sustainable investing as well as some history behind this investing practice.

The course isn’t designed to teach you everything there is to know about ESG investing but it does actually provide some great resources for you to be able to get started incorporating ESG investing into your portfolio.

US SIF goes over a list of positive contributions that ESG investing has already made to the world and lets you know about some steps you can take to begin creating impact with your investments.

This course also gives you some tools to let you see how your current investments measure up based on ESG factors.

This introduction does go into at least some depth about how to invest in stocks, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and some other investments using environmental, social, and governance criteria.

Another cool feature of this course is that it has some short quizzes at the end of each section. Maybe I’m a nerd but I like these. I think it’s a good way to make sure you’re retaining the information you’re learning about.