| Overall Rating | Gold - expired |
|---|---|
| Overall Score | 66.69 |
| Liaison | Laurie Husted |
| Submission Date | June 8, 2020 |
Bard College
PA-9: Committee on Investor Responsibility
| Status | Score | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
|
1.50 / 2.00 |
Taun
Toay Associate Vice President Vice President |
Does the institution have a formally established and active committee on investor responsibility (CIR) or equivalent body?:
The charter or mission statement of the CIR or other body which reflects social and environmental concerns or a brief description of how the CIR is tasked to address social and environmental concerns:
Through the Bard College Socially Responsible Investment Committee (a group of 4 elected student representatives and 4 faculty and staff members), Bard actively screens its investments and engages companies over issues of concern. The Socially Responsible Investment Committee (SRIC) is a Bard student-led committee that invests in corporations on behalf of Bard’s student body in order to facilitate positive social change within those corporations. The mission of the committee is to leverage power over corporations and to have an outsized impact in areas where we as students want to see improvement, and doing so with only a limited amount of money. The committee is made up of five elected students and an adviser, the college’s chief financial officer, Taun Toay.
Does the CIR include academic staff representation?:
Does the CIR include non-academic staff representation?:
Does the CIR include student representation?:
Members of the CIR, including affiliations and role:
The committee is made up of five elected students and an adviser, the college’s chief financial officer, Taun Toay.
Examples of CIR actions during the previous three years:
SRIC uses what is known as shareholder activism in attempt to facilitate positive social change within corporation. Shareholder activism is when a shareholder (partial owner of a company) engages with a company through letter writing, proxy voting or filing shareholder resolutions. The shareholder must own $2,000 worth of a company or enough shares that make up least 1% of a company. At Bard we specifically choose to invest in companies we feel need improvement to be more socially responsible in order to make positive changes from within. We are currently invested in ExxonMobil and Urban Outfitters.
Website URL where information about the institution’s committee on investor responsibility is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
Active shareholder work through a small investment (from the student website):
At ExxonMobil, we will be requesting that they formally denounce their knowledge about climate change and to establish a scholarship that will fund graduate students to get advanced degrees in climate science.
At Urban Outfitters, we will request that they have more supply chain transparency and that they will display information such as where they source their cotton to ensure that they are abiding by their ethical values, and not sourcing it from locations that have poor labor standards.
How we choose what to invest in: SRIC has held blind votes in the campus center, where we hand out ballots with descriptions of companies without their titles, and students have chosen where they would like change to occur. Going forward, surveys on what students want to invest in will be distributed via Google Survey. The committee is also receptive to student and club input in where students would like to see change.
How SRIC is unique to Bard: Clubs similar to SRIC, such as UPenn’s Social Responsibility Advisory Committee, exist at other institutions, but they are only advisory committees and have little to no rights to make investments like students at Bard do. They are only allowed to make recommendations to the managers of funds at their institutions.
Students in similar committees at other institutions, such as Divest Harvard, generally call for the divestment of funds from companies or industries they believe to be immoral, and to reinvest in a socially responsible company.
At Bard we specifically choose to invest in companies we feel need improvement to be more socially responsible in order to make positive changes from within.
Establishment: SRIC was founded in 2007 by an empowered group students who wanted to see where the college’s investments were going. These students received trustee approval to vote the proxy rights on any of the holdings on the endowment and to make investments themselves. They also established Bard’s Social Choice Fund, which is a fund that invests in companies that demonstrate direct and measurable environmental and social impacts and screens out any “sin” stocks.
Past Initiatives: SRIC at Bard introduced a resolution for McDonald’s that asked the company to stop its use of harmful pesticides on its potatoes. McDonald’s now monitors all of its potato pesticide use, which is over 25 percent of potatoes in North America, alongside phasing out the most harmful pesticides and meeting with Bard SRIC on an annual basis.
Active shareholder work through a small investment (from the student website):
At ExxonMobil, we will be requesting that they formally denounce their knowledge about climate change and to establish a scholarship that will fund graduate students to get advanced degrees in climate science.
At Urban Outfitters, we will request that they have more supply chain transparency and that they will display information such as where they source their cotton to ensure that they are abiding by their ethical values, and not sourcing it from locations that have poor labor standards.
How we choose what to invest in: SRIC has held blind votes in the campus center, where we hand out ballots with descriptions of companies without their titles, and students have chosen where they would like change to occur. Going forward, surveys on what students want to invest in will be distributed via Google Survey. The committee is also receptive to student and club input in where students would like to see change.
How SRIC is unique to Bard: Clubs similar to SRIC, such as UPenn’s Social Responsibility Advisory Committee, exist at other institutions, but they are only advisory committees and have little to no rights to make investments like students at Bard do. They are only allowed to make recommendations to the managers of funds at their institutions.
Students in similar committees at other institutions, such as Divest Harvard, generally call for the divestment of funds from companies or industries they believe to be immoral, and to reinvest in a socially responsible company.
At Bard we specifically choose to invest in companies we feel need improvement to be more socially responsible in order to make positive changes from within.
Establishment: SRIC was founded in 2007 by an empowered group students who wanted to see where the college’s investments were going. These students received trustee approval to vote the proxy rights on any of the holdings on the endowment and to make investments themselves. They also established Bard’s Social Choice Fund, which is a fund that invests in companies that demonstrate direct and measurable environmental and social impacts and screens out any “sin” stocks.
Past Initiatives: SRIC at Bard introduced a resolution for McDonald’s that asked the company to stop its use of harmful pesticides on its potatoes. McDonald’s now monitors all of its potato pesticide use, which is over 25 percent of potatoes in North America, alongside phasing out the most harmful pesticides and meeting with Bard SRIC on an annual basis.
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