He is the co-founder of Calvert Investments, one of the first and largest socially responsible mutual funds in the nation,[1] and has been acting as the Founding Chairman until his recent retirement.
[4] After his first year of law school, he spent 18 months hitchhiking through Africa and India, a transformative experience which piqued his curiosity about developing economies and ultimately inspired him to infuse business practices with a spiritual and social dimension.
[11] Also, it was the first fund to file shareholder resolutions to hold companies accountable to their stakeholder mission, which included issues of gender and racial parity in boardrooms.
[4] Calvert Impact Capital was approved as a community development financial institution (CDFI) by the United States Department of the Treasury in 2000.
[21] The company folded in 1986, and Silby made a second attempt in 1999 by launching GroupServe, which collapsed during the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001.
[22] In 2004, he recruited Guo Peiyuan to co-found Syntao, Ltd, a Chinese consulting firm in the area of corporate social responsibility.
[27] Silby splits his time between Beijing and Washington, D.C., and spends his summers at his beach cabin in Cortes Island.