Fried, 65, was a supporter of the slow money movement, which promotes local financial systems. Fried helped foster investments in local food businesses and he co-founded Clean Yield, an asset management company, with Doug Fleer in the mid 1980s.
Fleer and Fried met at a neighborhood gathering in 1983 and both shared a passion for social responsibility, the environment and financial markets. The Clean Yield began as a stock-market newsletter that featured socially screened companies and a model portfolio.
The model portfolio was so successful that people started to come to them for investment advice, and the company, based in Greensboro, quickly became an asset management firm that only invested in socially responsible companies.
Rick Hausman, who worked at Clean Yield from 1990 until his retirement in January this year, recalls that Fried “fired” clients who were more interested in financial profits than social responsibility.
“If he believed in a product or a company that had a social premium he would invest in these companies even if they were higher risk or lower return,” said Hausman.
Many of his former business partners and colleagues describe Fried as a pioneer. He and Fleer started one of the first socially responsible asset management companies in the nation. They challenged the widely held belief that in order to succeed investors must plow money into a broad range of businesses, Hausman said. “Portfolios can be highly profitable and fully diversified without investing in businesses that are not social,” he said in an email.
Fried would invest 95 percent of his client’s money in registered, and socially screened, Wall Street companies, and up to 5 percent in local start-ups, usually food oriented. Clean Yield does not invest in petroleum, nuclear power, gambling or U.S. Treasuries.
One of the companies he helped grow with investments from Clean Yield was High Mowing Organic Seeds, a producer and developer of organic fruit and vegetable seeds in Wolcott. The company, started in 1996, brought in $3 million in revenues last year, and has created work opportunities in the Hardwick area, according to Eric Becker, the current chief investment officer at Clean Yield.
Fried also brought investors to Vermont Smoke and Cure, a local producer of smoked bacon, sausage and ham.
Fried saw food as the core of a healthy economy and he invested in people who were involved the so-called slow food movement and needed help fighting off competition from big agribusiness, Becker said.
Becker worked with Fried for many years, and he has a hard time remembering what he did on his spare time. “It was hard to get him to take a real vacation,” Becker said. “Even on vacation he still always wanted to check in.”
Fried is survived by his wife, Rachel, and his daughter Dorigen, who manages one of the portfolios at Clean Yield.
