(March 29 – 16:00 ET) – Meritas Financial Inc. is launching a family of five socially responsible investment funds under the name Meritas Mutual Funds.

Meritas is a joint venture of Mennonite Savings and Credit Union (Ontario) Ltd., Waterloo, ON, Mennonite Mutual Aid, Goshen, Ind. and Mennonite Foundation of Canada, of Winnipeg.

The five funds — Meritas Money Market, Meritas Canadian Bond, Meritas Jantzi Social Index, Meritas U.S. Equity, and Meritas International Equity Fund — will be distributed through investment advisors, financial planners, banks, trust companies and credit unions across Canada beginning April 2.

“We have had tremendous interest in our funds from individual investors and the advisor community”, said Gary Hawton, CEO of Meritas Financial Inc. “We have been told that part of the appeal of our funds is that each of our sub-advisors has a long history of managing SRI portfolios,” Hawton added.

The Money Market and Canadian Bond funds will use Genus Capital Management of Vancouver, B.C .as a sub-advisor. MMA Capital Management, who currently manages the Praxis family of SRI funds in the U.S., will be sub-advisor on the U.S. Equity Fund.

Oechsle International, LLC has been retained for the International Equity Fund, which will focus its investments outside of North America. State Street Global Advisors will be sub-advisor on the Meritas Jantzi Social Index Fund.

“We think that the time is right for a solid entry into the SRI market in Canada with a comprehensive set of social and environmental screens, active shareholder status including the posting of our proxy votes on our Website and a community development investment aspect in each of our funds. With these in place and the experienced SRI sub-advisors that we have for each fund, we expect that a great number of investors and advisors are going to take notice,” added Hawton.

“In fact, given the unprecedented amount of press coverage that socially responsible investing has received over the last few months, I would expect that many advisors are going to feel the demand increase from clients to add a SRI family to their traditional line-up of fund families.”