Higher Purpose

Saingchin, class of 2000, earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration with concentrations in marketing and management information systems. After graduation, he landed a job at a Big 5 company, “because I wanted to make money.”

So how did he end up in Quito, Ecuador, where he can rock climb a few hours away while running Just Futures, the investment advisory firm he co-founded in 2022, that prioritizes societal well-being over pure profit. That story starts at UAlbany.

“Honestly SUNY Albany provided me with a space to think a lot more critically about my own multicultural identity, how I experience race in the world,” Saingchin said. He was born in New York and grew up in the Bronx, raised by immigrants: a Cuban mother and a Chinese and Thai father.

“I got involved in student organizing and I started to learn what it is to be in a community and to start having these powerful conversations around how the world works, how it should work and how it, quite frankly, doesn't.”

While at the Big 5 company, he wrote a newsletter that focused on diversity and what he saw as unfairness in corporate America. After the 9/11 attacks, his newsletters became more political, which did not sit well with management. He gave two days’ notice.

Saingchin, who decided the nonprofit world suited him more than the world of suits, applied to master’s programs. In the meantime, he took a job at the Asian American Federation of New York working on post-9/11 relief and recovery work. He helped people navigate benefits and find support after their loved ones died, they had lost their jobs, or were attacked because of their religion or color of their skin. It was a profound experience for him.

“I ended up, you know, really, really loving it because I was being mentored by people who saw something in me.” He deferred graduate school and helped build a citywide program to assist Asian Americans impacted by Sept. 11.  

Just because Saingchin left Alex P. Keaton’s hard-charging world didn’t mean that he had slowed down. Along the way, he worked for community-based organizations that kept his work aligned with his values. He received a law degree from Rutgers Law School in 2006 and worked for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. After working at the Urban Justice Center doing human rights work, Saingchin decided to move across the country for cleaner air.  “I was well into my climbing career and wanted to be outdoors more and I made the decision to move out to California, to the Bay Area. And I fell into philanthropy.”  He began looking at ways to give to nonprofit organizations from “a lens of community empowerment, from a lens of trying to address the racial wealth gap, right, and thinking about the climate crisis.”

Throughout his career, Saingchin noticed how an elite few controlled the money flowing through Wall Street. “And there was an incredible sense of unfairness, as to why is it that certain people can have privilege and others will work their asses off and they'll never get there? And why is it that I get to do this amazing work? And yet there's other people who I think work way harder than me. And it's like $2 an hour, right?”

A phone call from his friend, Steven Choi, changed everything. They were discussing how typical retirement funds lack social responsibility when they invest clients’ assets. Choi suggested they fill the void. They went on a listening tour of 200 nonprofits led by people of color, who validated their idea. Their firm, Just Futures, was born. And to align their own company with their principles, they’ve committed 55% of ownership to five nonprofit groups that are innovating toward a regenerative economy.

Just Futures connects nonprofits and their workers with investments aligned with the needs of people, communities and the planet. The vision of the company: “A financial system that creates value for people, communities, and planet — not just a privileged few.” Their mission:

“Folks would conveniently like to say that there are two separate things: How you make money and how you do good in the world. I think they're one and the same,”  Saingchin said. A regenerative economy “doesn't take away from people, doesn't take away from the earth, from the climate, from the land.” An extractive economy —our current one, according to Saingchin — does the opposite.

Saingchin considers himself a citizen of the world. He moved to Ecuador in 2023, he says, as part of his ongoing journey to understand the impacts of "unbridled corporate profiteering" on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color not only in the U.S. but in the Global South.

“If we're really honest with ourselves and where we are at in our world, in our society, we have a lot of work to do.”  Saingchin may just be getting started.