BOSTON (Reuters) – Inclusive Capital Partners, an environmental and social impact investment firm launched in 2020, said on Monday that one of its partners will join the board at Strategic Education Inc.
William Slocum has been invited by the company and has agreed to serve as a nominee for election to the company’s board at the 2021 annual meeting, Inclusive Capital, called InCap, said in a regulatory filing on Monday.
It is the second InCap board appointment in a day after ExxonMobil said earlier it had tapped Jeffrey Ubben, InCap’s co-founder, as a director amid fresh pressure from investors for it to focus more on clean energy and improve its financial performance.
The regulatory filing announcing Slocum’s directorship also said that InCap raised its ownership stake in Strategic Education, valued at $2.1 billion, to 6.14% from 5.65%. InCap is Strategic Education’s fourth largest owner.
InCap bought 121,784 shares on December 31, February 26 and March 1, when the stock traded between $87.79 and $95.17 a share, the filing said. In the last 52 weeks the stock has lost 41.31% and it closed trading at $86.49, having lost 4.87%.
While Slocum’s move attracted less notice than Ubben’s, it is noteworthy at a time InCap is building its credentials as a new firm and seeks to raise as much as $8 billion in capital for a new portfolio.
Two decades ago, Ubben founded ValueAct Capital and shaped the firm’s reputation as a friendlier activist whose partners work collaboratively with management behind the scenes on boards ranging from Microsoft to AES. He left last year to found InCap.
Slocum and fellow partners Eva Zlotnicka and Sarah Farrell are being groomed as the next generation of leaders at InCap. Slocum worked with Ubben at ValueAct before moving to Golden Gate Capital from 2011 to 2020.
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; editing by Richard Pullin)
