Horizons Sustainable Financial Services

Susan F. Colp, the firm's founder, serves as the primary portfolio manager and investment decision-maker. Colp holds the Certified Financial Planner designation and previously worked as an environmental scientist, a background that directly shapes the firm's fossil-fuel-free investment screens. All portfolio construction and security selection runs through her, consistent with the firm's structure as a boutique RIA with a lean professional staff.

Horizons screens out companies listed on the Carbon Underground 200, a ranking of the largest publicly traded coal, oil and gas reserve holders globally. The screen extends beyond equity holdings to fixed-income portfolios as well, where the firm excludes bonds issued by fossil-fuel extraction and production companies. Horizons constructs portfolios that go further than many ESG funds by applying the exclusion as a firm-wide mandate, not an optional overlay, and complements negative screening with positive allocations to green bonds, community development financial institutions, and municipal bonds financing renewable energy and water infrastructure.

No. Horizons does not operate proprietary funds, private investment vehicles, or pooled structures. The firm builds and manages separately managed accounts for each client, selecting individual equities, bonds and cash equivalents directly. This approach gives clients full transparency into every holding and avoids the diluted screens the firm identifies in many off-the-shelf sustainable ETFs and mutual funds.

The firm constructs portfolios across three primary asset classes: US large-cap equities screened for fossil-fuel exposure, investment-grade fixed income including green and municipal bonds, and cash equivalents placed with community banks and credit unions that meet the firm's sustainability criteria. Fixed-income allocations emphasize bonds financing renewable energy, affordable housing and water conservation. Horizons does not allocate to private equity, venture capital, hedge funds or commodities in its managed portfolios.

Horizons is headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and its client base concentrates in the Mountain West and Southwest regions, though the firm serves clients nationally through remote advisory relationships. The fixed-income book has a particular emphasis on regional issuers in New Mexico and Colorado, where Horizons sources municipal bonds directly tied to local sustainability projects. The firm does not maintain offices outside of Santa Fe.

The firm's client base includes individuals, trusts, estates, foundations and businesses, per its regulatory filings as a registered investment advisor. However, Horizons does not publicly market itself to large institutional allocators like pension funds or endowments, and its boutique structure and lean team make it better suited to high-net-worth families and values-aligned foundations seeking personalized sustainability mandates. The firm has not disclosed any institutional separate-account relationships.

Most RIAs and wealth platforms offer ESG as one sleeve or option alongside conventional portfolios, often using third-party ESG funds that apply standardized, sometimes weak, screens. Horizons applies fossil-fuel exclusion as a firm-wide mandate — every client portfolio is fossil-fuel-free, with no conventional fallback option — and selects individual securities directly rather than relying on packaged funds. The founder's background in environmental science, not finance, shaped the investment philosophy, and the firm has maintained this posture since 2013, before ESG became a mainstream marketing category.