RUN A CAMPAIGN >> Success Stories
Below are just a few of the success stories of students
running SRI campaigns over the last few years. If you are
part of a group that has a success story, or know of a group
not listed, here, please let us know.
Columbia University
/ Barnard College
The story of Barnard
and Columbia committing to SRI (or at least my involvement
in SRI) began my freshman year,
when
I joined the environmental group. Our organization had
begun an investigation of Columbia ’s “ecological
footprint.” and
this included forming a committee to research how Columbia ’s
investments affected the environment. In the course of
our research, we learned that if shareholders do not
vote their
proxies, their votes go to management. Then we learned
that Columbia , as a shareholder, never voted its proxies…
Our
group initiated a major campaign to make Columbia a
socially responsible investor involving the entire
community
- students,
faculty, alumnae and the administration (and anyone
else who would listen). Through awareness campaigns and one-on-ones,
our group grew from four to more than twenty members,
and we formed a separate group to focus solely on this
issue,
Students for Socially Responsible Investing. A musician
on campus even wrote a song for us. We linked our campaign
to
other campaigns, meeting with a number of campus organizations
and individuals to discuss the ways in which socially
responsible investing could be applied to different
social
justice
goals. We created a petition for SRI, and had it signed
by hundreds
of community members. In conjunction with the petitioning
effort, we posted flyers everywhere reading “Have
you signed?” We also held teach-ins to spread
the word. We began to make some progress. The administration
created
a working group, in which we were represented, to look
at the issue. Our group submitted a draft proposal
which
was
revised and then sent to the Trustees. In the winter
of 1999, the Columbia Trustees adopted a policy on
socially responsible
investing, releasing the school’s full investment
portfolio and forming a Committee on Socially Responsible
Investing,
charged with reviewing and making recommendations regarding
the ethical and social consequences of the University’s
investments.
The next year, we began a similar campaign
at Barnard College . Barnard is a seven sisters school
that is
part of Columbia
University , but that has an entirely separate endowment.
We left a message on every student’s phone machine,
inviting them to a meeting on SRI. From that meeting,
we created Barnard Students for Socially Responsible
Investing.
Our group began a campaign to inform the community
about SRI, posting up amusing flyers like “Did
you know that we own the corporations that rule the
WORLD?” We also
just set aside times to speak to students about socially
responsible investing (we found the cafeteria to be
an especially good place to find and involve the first-years).
Our group
created a draft proposal for SRI, and began showing
it to various community members for feedback. We gave
a presentation
on SRI to our student governing body, which voted to
approve it. We gave another presentation to a faculty
community,
which was positively received. We attempted to meet
with the head of the alumnae association, but that
turned out
to be fairly difficult, as she traveled often. After
we believed we had received sufficient input on the
proposal, and community
backing for SRI, we brought our proposal to the administration.
We began having weekly meetings with the Vice President
of Finance and Administration to finalize a proposal
to submit
to the Trustees. At one point, a new Vice President
for Finance and Administration was appointed and we
continued our work
with him. Fortunately, our President supported the
idea of SRI, which was a big help.
In the spring of
2002, we received permission from the Trustees to
give a presentation about SRI to their
Investment
Committee.
The main arguments of our presentation was
as follows:
- i. Socially responsible investing has become fairly
common at universities/colleges.
- ii. The Trustees would still have complete control
over the endowment: our Committee’s
role would be to advise the Trustees over ethical issues relating to our endowment,
but final control over the funds would remain fully with them.
- iii. As a non-profit institution chartered to act in the public interest,
it is our legal responsibility to consider the impact our investment decisions
have on the public.
- iv. As an educational institution, it is our responsibility to vote on
proxies after a rigorous intellectual discussion on the issues at hand,
rather than
surrendering our vote to management. In other words, either way we are
voting our proxies,
the question is whether we will do it in a deliberate and conscientious
manner, or whether we will vote blindly.
- v. Our school has committed itself to certain policies, such as the fact
that we are an equal opportunity employer. It would be hypocritical for
us to advocate
for certain social principles within the school, but then defeat them with
our investment policy.
The Investment Committee listened and discussed our
proposal, and then reported on SRI to the entire
body of Trustees. In the summer of 2002,
the Trustees
of Barnard voted to create a Committee on SRI composed of two students,
two faculty,
two alumnae, and a non-voting administrative member. Unfortunately, we
did not get disclosure of the portfolio at that point. The next year, our
newly-formed
Committee raised the possibility of portfolio disclosure, and the Trustees
decided
to a) make the investment portfolio available to the Committee twice a
year, not more than six months out of date; and b) to allow us to disclose
information
about our portfolio to members of the Barnard community in verbal format,
and, if we received advance permission from the Trustees, in written format.
Our
current goals are to convince the Trustees to make the portfolio public
to the entire
community, and to agree to inform us of how they voted on our Committee
recommendations… not
in the least because I don’t like for us to be behind Columbia on
these kinds of issues!!!
We continue with our work, and have broadened
it to be a general social
justice organization, with a particular focus on socially responsible
investing. During my time there, we decided we needed
a “sexier” name,
and changed the group name to Students for Environmental and Economic
Justice, or, as we
like to call it, SEEJ! It’s very important to have a cool group
name. Too bad we didn’t foresee what would happen when we made
the change at Barnard - Barnard Students for Environmental and Economic
Justice -
as that became known
as BSEEJ. (Say it out loud. A little too close to BESEIGED for comfort!)
At this point, I believe the groups have united, so no need to worry
about that anymore…
My experience with SRI in school was incredible.
Through participation in an SRI campaign, I came to understand that
the codes of shareholder
rights
and
responsibilities hold within themselves the ability to fundamentally
shift the guidelines by which
society measures worth. Advocating for SRI provides schools with an
opportunity to influence a wide range of social justice
issues, and can lead to long-term
positive social changes, most importantly the ability to pressure companies
to measure their well-being by considering both their social and fiscal
impact on
the public.
University of Pennsylvania
The Penn Student Alliance
to Reform Corporations began its efforts in the
spring of 2000 under the
leadership of Alisa
Valderrama with a rather simple list of demands that were
delivered to the Penn trustees. The proposal asked the trustees
to consider human rights, environmental consequences, indigenous
rights and other ethical issues when selecting stocks for
the University’s portfolio. This proposal was deemed “nebulous
in scope” which basically meant the trustees had no
idea how to act upon our request or determine how it might
impact Penn’s endowment performance.
PennSARC went
back to work and began researching a new approach. Using
information on the history of SRI, apartheid divestment
at Penn, Penn’s founding documents and precedents
set by many of Penn’s peer institutions, SARC wrote
a proposal that set the terms for how Penn might institutionalize
a
more-ethical investment strategy. SARC forgot its original
divestment goals and instead focused upon inspiring Penn
to be an active shareholder. SARC turned in its final proxy
proposal in October of 2002. It took another seven months
for this proposal to be accepted.
SARC’s greatest
success to date has been convincing the Trustees of the
University of Pennsylvania to create
the “Social Responsibility Advisory Committee” in
the spring of 2003. The advisory committee is just taking
shape and PennSARC remains active as a campus gadfly,
working to guarantee that its bureaucratic sister-committee
does
her work.
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore’s
Committee for Socially Responsible Investing (CSRI)
started up in 1998 by a group of students who, together
with college administrators and members of their Board
of
Managers, began the process of using the College’s
stockholder status to advocate social change.
In 2002,
Swarthmore’s CSRI filed a shareholder resolution
on sexual orientation nondiscrimination to Lockheed
Martin. This resolution was the first in the country
solely initiated
by a college or university since the anti-apartheid
movement in the 1980s. The outreach efforts to other
shareholders
by the committee were realized after a successful shareholder
meeting where five percent of the shareholders voted
in favor of the Swarthmore resolution, more than the
three percent
vote needed to refile the resolution next year. This
prompted Lockheed Martin to change its equal employment
opportunity
policy a few months later.
In 2003, Swarthmore co-filed
two shareholder resolutions on sexual orientation nondiscrimination
to Masco Corporation
and Dover, which were withdrawn when both Masco and
Dover decided to amend their employment policies without
bringing
the issue to the annual shareholders’ meetings.
Swarthmore hopes to continue being successful in
its process of advocating one aspect of its philosophy—to
create an intentionally ethical community.
Williams
College
Williams has had three
campaigns on SRI issues in the past quarter century.
After experiencing significant
demonstrations
against investments in South Africa in the late
1970s, the college administration agreed to facilitate
dialogue
within
the community. The result was the Advisory Committee
on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), which was
created by
President John
Chandler in 1978. The ACSR has remained active
till today, voting on social and environmental shareholder
resolutions.
The committee is composed of two students, two
administrators,
two alumni, and two faculty (one of which serves
as
chair). While not specifically stipulated in the
committee charter,
currently the Vice President/Treasurer and Provost
are the administrators serving on the committee.
Flashing forward 20 years from the inception of
the ACSR, Williams students became concerned with
the
questionable social/environmental records of
a
number of major corporations
in which the college had endowment investments.
So, they
launched into a dialogue and eventual campaign
on the issue with the administration. It is an
inspiring
story
and all
the details are available in the Resources
section under Misc. Or, just click
here.
In 2003,
as a student member on the ACSR, I became increasingly
interested in creating more effective
communication channels
between the committee and the college community.
As a result of careful thought and discussion
among committee
members,
a new communication policy was drafted to increase
the
accessibility of committee activity to the
college community. If you'd
like to read a draft proposal of the transparency
policy (renamed the communication policy, since
it goes beyond
just transparency), click
here.
After some discussion
about how disclosure would occur, the committee
agreed on three
main points:
1) announcements of all ACSR meetings should
be posted in the college calendar as well
as on the
new committee
website;
2) the list of endowment portfolio holdings
should be moved from a print version in the
library,
to an easily
accessible
digital format online--available to all college
community members and alumni;
3) the proxy voting record of the committee,
as well as a brief description explaining
our decision,
should
be
made
available in a timely fashion--within one
week of the annual general meeting of each
corporation
under
consideration.
The committee approved a slightly
modified version of the proposal and it was sent
to
the Finance
Committee of the
Board of Trustees for review and approval.
At the March 2004 Finance Committee meeting,
the
trustees
approved
the policy!
As of April, 2004, the website is under
development and
ACSR hopes to launch the new website by
May 1, 2004.
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