From East Bay Citizen

Nov. 16, 2011 | Members of the Peralta Community College Board of Trustees charged with overseeing over 45,000 students in the East Bay voted Tuesday night to acquiesce to the growing power of the Occupy movement by beginning the process of pulling its assets from large banking institutions.

The resolution, first introduced by Trustee Abel Guillen, asks the community college chancellor to provide the board a list of recommendations for beginning the move to smaller community-based banks and credit unions no later than the end of January.

For the full article visit: East Bay Citizen

Bethex Federal Credit Union, one of the two institutions working for the Bronx community that Fordham will be supporting.

In May of 2010, a group of student activists and I got together in my apartment to talk about the possibility of community investment at our school, Fordham University. This meeting would not have happened if a month or so earlier I hadn’t met with Martin Bourqui, the National Organizer for REC. He contacted my roommate Michael and I because we had previously talked to REC about endowment transparency and other responsible investing topics we were interested in. Things had kind of fizzled out by this point, but Martin thought otherwise. I had heard about REC’s new community investment campaign from Martin’s predecessor Cheyenna. It sounded good, but at the time I was too interested in what I had already learned about and didn’t see what turned out to be the right thing to do

By the Spring of 2010, I had been a part of a few unsuccessful campaigns. When I heard what Martin had to say, I knew it was a good idea. Community investment just made sense at Fordham for so many reasons. We were a private university located in the middle of a poor urban area that everybody knows, the Bronx. Fordham also has a strong history of connections to the Bronx, spanning back to the 1960s and especially the 70s during the “Bronx is Burning” period. At that time, Fordham students, alumni, and Bronx community members got together and began organizing for a better Bronx. That legacy has continued with Fordham’s strong community service program. I thought I could make the connections to continue it further.

The unofficial slogan of our campaign was “the Bronx deserves better,” and with the help of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, I think we gave them something better.

The university plans to invest $500,000 into Bronx financial institutions over the summer: $250,000 in Bethex Federal Credit Union and $250,000 in the Burnside Ave., Morris Height Banking Development District of the Amalgamated Bank. This money will be used by Bronx community members to take out a mortgage on their first house, buy a car, go to school, and start small businesses – all things that would help lead to economic empowerment for one of the country’s poorest areas.

Our group, Fordham for the Bronx, isn’t ready to stop either. Although I will have graduated, the group is looking into ways that we could get other large institutions in the Bronx to begin investing in Bethex and Amalgamated. The Responsible Endowments Coalition really helped us create strategy and implement the tactics necessary to our successful campaign. Personally, REC has allowed me to take on leadership and supported my decisions throughout the campaign, giving me the tools to be successful. I couldn’t have done it without the other members of Fordham for the Bronx, or without the Responsible Endowments Coalition.

Way to go!

Ed. note: Congratulations to Brett and Fordham for the Bronx for your amazing work!

The article is here, though it’s behind a paywall.

Check out the school at www.strose.edu.

At 10:15 AM on Tuesday, May 18th, I entered One Chase Plaza, JP Morgan Chase’s world headquarters with representatives from Loyola University Chicago, Swarthmore College, Rainforest Action Network, and Waterkeeper Alliance, for the annual shareholder meeting.

Outside, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir marched in green robes, calling on the bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining.  Inside, people waited to hear from Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO, and one of the most “respected” bankers in the US, and to say their piece about what JPMorgan is and should be doing.

For the last few years, JPMorgan Chase has been one of the largest financers of mountaintop removal coal mining in America. Mountaintop removal mining is a horrible practice that levels mountains, pollutes water supplies, and tears apart the fabric and resources of communities in central Appalachia in West Virginia and Kentucky. Even the coal mining companies have said that it can’t be done without violating the regulations and permitting of the EPA and other government agencies.

So how did we get here, to the center of corporate America?

Loyola University Chicago, a Jesuit university, set up a shareholder advocacy committee three years ago to engage with the companies that their endowment has stock in around issues of sustainability and social responsibility.

Last fall, Loyola filed a resolution with support from the Responsible Endowments Coalition, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and other allies asking for JPMorgan to report on their financing of mountaintop removal and to implement a policy stopping it. Though omitted by the SEC Loyola continued the dialogue, engaging JPMorgan’s senior management and encouraging them to change.  In our dialogue, the company agreed to publish a statement, but then backed away. It seemed like they were thinking, “Why should the most profitable bank in the country listen to these people?”

But on the Monday before the meeting, JPMorgan published its first statement on mountaintop removal, both a big victory for Loyola, REC, and our allies, and a step forward for JPMorgan. In the policy, the company said that they no longer financed the practice, but didn’t commit to a verifiable practice.

JPMorgan Chase needs a transparent and verifiable way to completely stop financing companies that are engaged in mountaintop removal coal mining.

At the shareholder meeting,, we confronted Jamie Dimon, demanding a stronger policy in front of fellow shareholders of JPMorgan, and received cheers from the audience for our comments and questions. Even at a meeting of many loyal shareholders, attendees knew which way the wind was blowing.

It’s the end of the semester and many campaigns in our movement are wrapping up with student government resolutions supporting demands for responsible and accountable investment policies at our schools. These resolutions are often the results of hours of petitioning, tabling, and teach-ins designed to educate the campus community and gain support for ethical endowment practices. Two of those resolutions come from committed REC affiliates at Washington University-St. Louis, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Macalester College.

Washington University-St. Louis students organized Washington University Students for Endowment Transparency (WUSET) last year after learning that many members of the Board of Trustees are connected (by Boards or employment) to dirty energy companies in order to give students and the campus community, not industry interests, a say in how the school’s money is invested. After months of rallying, petitioning, meeting with officials, and otherwise raising a ruckus the WUSET has successfully convinced the student government to support their efforts to bring accountability to Wash U investments, predominately by establishing a Committee on Investor Responsibility like those  in place at the top universities in the nation. The school plans to begin reviewing other responsible investment policies and develop recommendations this summer. A website about this effort is expected this month.

University of Michigan-Ann Arbor graduate and undergraduate students from Net Impact and environmental groups successfully passed a resolution supporting responsible investment practices of the endowment. That resolution focuses on developing proxy voting guidelines on environmental and social issues to add to the existing guidelines in use for governance and financial issues. If  the UM administration agrees it will be largest public university endowment voting environmental and social proxies!

Macalester College students recently passed a referendum defining socially responsible investing for their campus. They have since met with administrators who are eager to integrate students into the investment process and are open to using the guidelines students approved!  You can read the referendum here.

If your group is currently pushing a resolution, or has successfully passed one, let us know! We’d love to share the news and are happy to provide you with copies of previously submitted and passed resolutions from other schools as well. For access to those resources email organize (at) endowmentethics (dot) org.

Most of us make daily purchasing decisions based on our ethics. We buy local, organic, grass-fed, recycled, biodegradable, fair trade —and the list goes on. But one major financial decision that gets overlooked is banking. We sign up with whatever bank happens to come on campus, in the hope that our university has invited them there, and would not lead us astray. Sometimes you even get a free tote bag and lots of pens. But as students demanding socially responsible investment from our universities, what decisions are we making in our daily life to support this goal? How can we ask our university to invest responsibly if we are not doing so ourselves?
Why are banks interested in our money? Students generally have lots and lots of debt, and that they generally pay it back with interest. Similarly our college degrees mean we’re more likely to get fancy jobs, a fancy mortgage and then produce more kids who will go to college and repeat the cycle. While our $150 in the bank may pale in comparison to the billions of dollars of university endowment money, our say actually matters to commercial banks. For us, it makes a much smaller impact than the consumer choices we already make.

So what choices do we have? Fortunately there are many banks out there with ethical policies. Many smaller banks have mission statements directly impacting the local community, especially community banks and community investment credit unions. They’re perfectly safe and have the added benefit of being locally owned and operated rather than being controlled by global shareholders far removed from the community’s economy.

Just before the financial crisis hit, I decided to help students in New York become aware of the importance of their personal banking and possible solutions to banking problems. I had a Bank of America card weighing down my wallet, so I decided to start there. I did some research about Bank of America’s practices and where it invested its money, or rather MY money. I discovered there was a national campaign against Bank of America and Citigroup based on their financing of coal, from the destructive mountaintop removal mining, to the construction and maintenance of new coal plants. The environment is a passionate subject for many students these days, so I figured I’d center my campaign on this issue. I also received support from the Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace who were already involved in this struggle. Then the financial crisis occurred, which made it all the easier to show the big commercial banks are not investing our money responsibly.

I had done my research on the negatives of commercial banking, but was left with the question: where CAN I bank? Through the help of REC I managed to get in touch with The National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions [NFCDCU], and thus found one near my university, NYU. I walked into the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union, to wait in line amongst a diverse group of locals. I had a lovely conversation with a banker there, who was so excited about the prospects that she offered to come on campus virtually whenever I wanted. I signed up for an account on the spot. We set a date, reserved a table in the lobby of our student center, and set to work creating an event where students could sign up on the spot. Then I promoted it by going to every environmental, social justice and community group on campus.

Unfortunately there is a lot of financial illiteracy, even amongst college students, so we prepared information to help educate people. We called out “Green Your Greenbacks” and other fun slogans and handed out flyers.  A few people signed up for bank accounts and many more stopped to ask questions, a huge feat in New York, where people always gaze disinterestedly at the ground and steamroll through crowds. Overall I’d say the event was a great success. At the end of the event, the people from the credit union gave me a big hug and invited me to come back and help them in the future. I think that when I hold the event again next semester more  students will be ready to sign up to invest responsibly.