United Church Funds

United Church Funds

United Church Funds was founded in 1969 to manage investments for the United Church of Christ (UCC), a mainline Protestant denomination with roughly 4,600 congregations. President and CEO Michael Perrino oversees the pooled investment platform from New York, serving UCC churches, conferences, and affiliated ministries. The entity operates not as a discretionary endowment manager but as a denominational investment office, aggregating trust assets to gain access that individual parishes could not achieve alone. The firm offers eleven funds spanning domestic and international equities, fixed income, and balanced strategies, all governed by socially responsible investing screens rooted in UCC resolutions. The lineup includes a Beyond Fossil Fuels Fund, reflecting the 2013 General Synod resolution on divestment, alongside core equity and bond vehicles. Allocation extends across large-cap US stocks, developed and emerging-market equities, and investment-grade and high-yield debt. The geographic footprint covers US and global developed markets, with emerging-market exposure through dedicated international mandates. United Church Funds publishes neither total assets under management nor headcount figures. Congregations and affiliated bodies subscribe to its offerings through a trust structure that blends each entity's capital within commingled vehicles. The organization does not report outside institutional clients beyond the UCC ecosystem. Per its most recent public communications, the firm has deepened engagement on climate and racial equity investing through proxy voting guidelines and active ownership programs. Structurally, the organization sits at the intersection of a faith-based pooled trust and a conventional investment manager — a model that provides small, mission-aligned endowments with access to institutional pricing and manager selection without requiring them to build internal investment committees. The firm's governance flows from UCC polity, with a board of directors drawn from denomination leadership and laity, creating a distinct accountability loop that ties investment decisions to synod-level ethical mandates.