The Future Is Brighter
A Conversation with Georgia’s Newest B Corp, Brighter Investing
Brighter Investing is a full-service financial and investment advisory firm that specializes in sustainable and impact investing. Co-founded by Gary Whitehurst and Nancy Sagar in April 2019, the company helps individual investors, nonprofits, and foundations align their investment portfolios with their growth goals AND what matters most to them … climate, the environment, sustainable business, human health, economic equity, equality, and much more.
As a Public Benefit LLC, Brighter is committed to the “triple bottom line” – people, planet, and prosperity – and serves as a fiduciary for clients plus broader social and environmental impact on the pressing issues we face in the world today, like climate & the environment, human health, widening inequality and more.
In July 2025, Brighter Investing achieved Certified B Corp status, affirming that it meets B Lab’s rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. This milestone signals their dedication to continual improvement and integrity in serving stakeholders and communities.
As a B Corp, they must uphold legally embedded stakeholder commitments and undergo re-certification every three years. This formal recognition helps clients trust in Brighter to growth their wealth and generate measurable positive impact as well.
We recently sat down with CEO Gary Whitehurst to learn more about the business, their certification, and why now was finally the right time to certify.
Nathan: First of all, congratulations. Excited to be on the other side of the certification, and excited for some other stuff y’all have been working on. How does it feel to be a B Corp?
Gary: Thanks Nathan! In many ways, this is an affirmation of all the things we’ve been doing since we launched the company. To finally go through the official approval process feels great for all of us. Getting certified is an important step for the company, and our clients and partners have been enthusiastic about the news.
Nathan: For those that don’t know how long you’ve been working on your B Corp certification, Brighter has been incredibly intentional in this process. Y’all first took the assessment with my students at UGA back in 2019. What was it that finally told you that you were ready and now was the time?
Gary: It all goes back to 2018 when Nancy Sagar and I first started talking about sustainable investing and the impact we could help clients make. As we were going through our ideas and diligence, we talked about the legal Public Benefit Corporation versus B Corp certification and decided that we wanted to be both. So we formed as a PB LLC in Delaware and then set our sights on B certification when we met you in 2019. We were confident that we were running the business in a way that would qualify us, but when it came down to the concrete steps of working through the process and documenting everything, we just didn’t have the time at that point in Brighter’s life. You and Jenna kept nudging us and that helped, but we literally just needed more horsepower to take the process over the finish line. So when Kelsey Russell joined the company, we knew it was time.
Nathan: I love B Corps that walk the walk. Brighter recently launched a social justice investment strategy. Tell us more about that and what helped launch this from idea to product.
Gary: We’re always looking for opportunities to help our clients make a greater impact with their money. The social justice strategy was born from deep conversations about place-based investing and impact here in Georgia and the southeast. Kelsey recruited an incredible social justice advisory board, then built a framework to empower investors to support economic equity, mobility, and financial empowerment through their bank, a specific portfolio of public investments, and private market opportunities when appropriate. It’s essentially a structure and a map on top of our normal process, which is to build highly personalized portfolios for each client.
Nathan: I know we go way back, but I do feel a certain way about companies being intentional with the B Corp consultants they partner with to navigate this process. How did Brighter benefit from working with a Southeastern B Corp consultant?
Gary: That help was really worthwhile. Getting certified is a big initiative, and parts of the process can feel daunting. A consultant can give you the bird’s eye view of the entire assessment and knows the relative values of different criteria, so they can help you identify where to focus your efforts. For example, if there’s something you do but don’t currently have a documented process in place, a consultant might advise you to just skip that topic and concentrate where you can get a bigger lift. It makes the process tangible and focused on the end goal – certification with a passing score.