Religious shareholder activism dates back to the Nineteen Seventies
Until the Nineties, the nuns had made little investment. That modified once they began to put aside money to take care of older sisters because the community aged.
“We decided it was really important to do this in a responsible way,” said Sister Rose Marie Stallbaumer, who served because the community’s treasurer for a few years. “We wanted to make sure we weren’t just raising money to help ourselves and harming others in the process.”
The beginnings of religiously motivated shareholder activism can often be traced back to the early Nineteen Seventies, when religious groups introduced resolutions calling for the withdrawal of American corporations from South Africa due to apartheid.
In 2004, the Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica joined the Benedictine Coalition for Responsible Investment, an umbrella organization led by Sister Susan Mika, a nun from a convent in Texas who has been energetic in the sector because the Eighties.
The Benedictine Coalition works closely with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, which acts as a clearinghouse for shareholder resolutions and coordinates work with religious groups – including dozens of Catholic orders – to leverage assets and act on social justice issues.
The Benedictines have played a key role on the ICCR for years, says Tim Smith, a senior policy adviser at the middle. It will be discouraging when things improve only barely every year, but he says the sisters “have the stamina of long-distance runners.”
The resolutions are rarely adopted, and even once they are, they are often non-binding. But they’re still an academic tool and a method of raising awareness inside a corporation. The Benedictines have seen approval of a few of their resolutions rise from low single digits to 30 percent or perhaps a majority through the years.
Gradually, environmental and human rights concerns have won over some shareholders, while at the identical time a growing backlash against ESG (environmental, social and governance) investments is gaining momentum.
