By Moki Macias & Rose Levine

Submitted Spring 2008

The campaign for responsible investment at Mount Holyoke College (MHC), a small, elite private school in Western Massachusetts, jumped off in fall 2002. We had been part of a student group working with local community members and laborers to force MHC to adopt fair labor standards. As student organizers involved in these efforts, we were already thinking about the relationship of the College to the surrounding working class communities, and about the disconnect between the way the College used its resources (by employing contractors that exploited workers, for example) and its stated mission of good community citizenship. When we decided to focus on MHC’s endowment as a way to address these issues we saw an opportunity to institutionalize positive investment in the community while at the same time opening up new areas for student involvement in the functioning of the College.

After doing some research, we got excited about the possibility of investing in locally-based, locally-controlled Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), which make capital available to collectives and small businesses, community organizations, and land trusts or other housing models designed to keep housing affordable. Philosophically, we liked this idea because it would institutionalize a way for the college to be directly injecting capital into the surrounding communities, without having control over how the money was spent. What we argued to the trustees was the “educational investment” potential of such an arrangement:  the College relied on the surrounding communities (especially the poorest areas) to provide real-world educational experiences for its troops of well-intentioned students, often sapping more resources from these very organizations than it provided. By channeling money through CDFIs that would support many of these same organizations, Mount Holyoke would be supporting the capacity and longevity of these organizations.

The challenge for our campaign—which is applicable to most campus organizing—was to develop a culture of organizing that encouraged and supported new people stepping in and taking over, and to create structures that would institutionalize the changes we were proposing even when it was no longer an active campaign. The people who started it knew that it was going to take longer to win the campaign than the time we were there. We were very deliberate about bringing in fresh faces and mentoring leaders within our group. We made sure that the work, the knowledge, and the decision-making were shared: no one person monopolized the information, and the biggest portion of our time with new members was spent training them on the nitty-gritty details of the endowment and investing. We found ways to make it accessible and exciting (most often through our “encowment” model, which we ended up taking on the road and sharing at workshops with other schools). A mechanism to institutionalize community investment, as well as a committee charged with examining and promoting socially responsible investment, was a consistent part of our proposals to the trustees.

In the spring of 2005, after three years of hard work, Mount Holyoke's Socially Responsible Investment committee was officially created and successfully raised $25,000 for a pilot Responsible Investment Fund. The committee has so far invested $7,000 in the Cooperative Fund of New England, a CDFI that prioritizes lending in Western Massachusetts. In addition, the Committee has invested $5,000 in the New Alternatives Fund, a screened mutual fund primarily invested in alternative energy sources. As the fund matures, the interest generated from its investments will be used to create a scholarship fund for students from Western Massachusetts, thus further promoting our original goal of investment in our surrounding community.

Moki Macías, who graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 2004, is the Development Director at The Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm that enforces the civil and human rights of those targeted by the criminal justice system in the South, particularly the poor and people of color. Rose Levine graduated in 2005, and is a master activist puppet-maker and teacher in Philadelphia, as well as serving as REC's Board President.