In 2008, when she was in her mid-20s and sitting on a $500 million inheritance, Liesel Pritzker Simmons asked her bankers about “impact investing." They fobbed her off. “They didn’t understand what I meant and offered to screen out tobacco,” recalls the Hyatt Hotels descendant, philanthropist and former child film star. So she fired her bankers and advisers and set up her own family office, Blue Haven Initiative. It seeks investments that both offer market-rate returns and have a positive impact on society and the environment.

Such ideas are gaining ground, particularly among the young. Fans of “socially responsible investment” (SRI) hope that millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, will drag these concepts into the investment mainstream. The US Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, a lobby group, estimates that more than a fifth ($8.7 trillion) of the funds under professional management in America is screened on SRI criteria, broadly defined, up from a ninth in 2012.

Read the full article about millennials and SRIs at The Economist.