At the intersection of finance, impact investing, and Native leadership stands Valerie Red-Horse Mohl, whose career embodies both innovation and inclusion. Of Cherokee ancestry, she began her career at Drexel Burnham Lambert and later founded Red-Horse Financial Group, one of the first Native American–owned investment banks in the U.S., through which she helped structure and raise billions in capital for tribal nations and underserved communities.
Appointed in February 2025 as Deputy Chief Investment Officer for Responsible Investing at the New York City Comptroller’s Office and its $300 billion public pension plan, Red-Horse Mohl helps oversee the city’s five public pension systems while leading a newly created department focused on Responsible Investing. Her work spans diverse and emerging managers, economically targeted investments that channel capital into New York communities, ESG and climate initiatives, and DEI assessments across existing managers. Representing a workforce that is roughly 70% women and/or people of color, she ensures the city’s investment strategy combines fiduciary rigor with an inclusive vision that reflects the communities it serves.
In an exclusive conversation during NAIC’s Amplifying Alts Forum, Red-Horse Mohl reflects on integrating responsible investing into public pension portfolios, the importance of cultural perspective in capital allocation, and the broader movement toward a more inclusive and innovative future across alternatives.
NAIC: How do you balance the goal of generating risk-adjusted returns with the mission to drive social impact through your programs?
RED-HORSE MOHL: It’s interesting. I was just on a call, and one of the other participants on the call said, ‘Everyone knows that impact investing is not doing well; they’re not making the returns.’ And I said, ‘Hold on, I’m going to push back on that.’ We look at financial returns first. As a pension fund, you cannot approach anything in a concessionary manner. These are individuals who plan to retire and use that money for the rest of their lives.
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Our approach to impact investing is to first see the financial return. And the data I have seen is that impact investments often outperform.
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We’re not like a foundation or an endowment that can have PRIs, concessionary investments, or grants. And so, we lead with market-rate returns, track records, and proven strategies, and then we examine the potential impact and how we can achieve both. However, we must start with the financial return. In my world, there is no concessionary investing. Quite often, when you find Alpha, it’s in overlooked, underserved areas. And so I do think we’re on an uptick in terms of being able to explore that even more than we are. In our office, we have an aspirational goal of having 20% of our fund managers be diverse by 2029, and we’re at about 14% right now.
NAIC: I know you’ve worked with some of the tribal nations. Could you tell me a little bit about those experiences?
RED-HORSE MOHL: I was in school at UCLA as a film major, knew nothing about finance and took a part-time job for Mike Milken. He was at Drexel Burnham Lambert at the time and came from New York City, bringing his high-yield bond department, Leveraged Finance. I took a job there just to make some extra money, not knowing it would change the trajectory of my life. After working with Mike, I learned a great deal about capital markets, the combination of debt and equity, and how to utilize leverage properly.
I saw all these founders doing deals with seven times leverage, and yet it worked out. I was a female Native American student, and I didn’t see anyone getting funding who was a person of color or a woman. The experience working with Mike inspired me to launch the first Native-owned investment bank, focusing on my own communities. We were building casinos at the time. The tribal casino resort industry has been a significant contributor to our economic growth and is a $43 billion industry right now. When I began helping tribes raise money, I also started managing their portfolios.
NAIC: You were a film major at UCLA and still have a film production company. How do storytelling and cultural representation influence the way you think about leadership and the power of capital to drive change?
RED-HORSE MOHL: Senator Daniel Inouye (the former Democrat from Hawaii and a former head of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee) met with me in 1997 and encouraged me to use my training and experience to not only launch an investment bank but also a film production company – as he believed we need to manage our own funding but also control our own image and tell our own stories. The two are very much linked to a community’s identity and self-sufficiency. Our financial independence matters, and our stories matter.
NAIC: What are the biggest challenges to expanding a DEI or a diverse and emerging manager program, given the current environment?
RED-HORSE MOHL: Wall Street is a system that’s been in place for hundreds of years. It was founded on principles of colonization. The white male manager and the white male-led firm have been established as the experts.
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What I’m seeing, even with people who are really supportive of diverse managers, is that there is often an unconscious bias that if a woman or person of color walks in the room as a fund manager, it says risk to some people.
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It’s not necessarily deep-rooted racism or sexism. And it’s been reinforced for a really long time. I think we need to change the unconscious bias that just because we haven’t been there longer and haven’t had the opportunity for hundreds of years, it doesn’t mean we can’t do amazing things now. As far as the current climate, if we lead with performance and financial returns, we are simply doing our fiduciary duties. I do not think finding talent and alpha in underrepresented and overlooked areas is necessarily DEI or any other label except logical, good business.
NAIC: When you think about the next three to five years, what metrics of success will you use to evaluate whether responsible investing and diverse emerging manager programs have delivered both financially and in terms of equity and inclusion?
RED-HORSE MOHL: For the diverse managers, aspirationally, we aim to achieve a 20% diverse manager representation in our overall portfolio. We aim to reach 10% of emerging managers within the same timeframe; these are typically younger funds. I will also find success in the Responsible Investing program if we see improvements in capital flowing into New York City, through our Economically Targeted Investments (ETIs), which will ultimately benefit underserved, low-income communities while realizing a market rate return.
We’re looking at healthcare programs for the unhoused, small business support, climate solutions and affordable housing, to name a few. These are initiatives that will make us the necessary financial returns, but also really improve New York. I intend to have impact reports alongside financial reports. So my hope is overall that the outcome will be in the next three to five years, that we’re setting a roadmap that says, “You can make money and do incredible things.” And then I think of my own succession plan, which is I’m really elevating my entire team and office to continue with the pathways that I’ve created, where I’ve removed some barriers. Now, let’s just continue expanding them.