Putting Our Money Where Our Hearts Are
The end of apartheid in South Africa marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. In 1985 the congregation joined hundreds of other religious groups to bring the art of persuasion and economic pressure to bear on public companies that were invested in the structural oppression of black South Africans. The movement is credited at least in part with dismantling apartheid. It was that incident, says Sister Linda Hayes, the congregation’s director of corporate responsibility, that awakened her to the powerful voice of socially responsible investing.
Since 1985 the congregation has been associated with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), a 30-year-old organization that represents 275 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish institutional investors with combined portfolios worth more than $110 billion. Members of ICCR engage in socially responsible investing, which Sister Linda says is “using our assets to hold companies accountable for their impact on the environment or on society.” They are also “a means of expressing our values through economic structures,” she explained.
Like other ICCR members, the Springfield Dominicans build investment portfolios around social justice values. The sisters invest just enough in some companies to have a voice in changing unjust policies. One success story, Sister Linda says, is the impact ICCR members had on the Coco-cola Company. In an unprecedented move, the company supported a shareholder resolution calling on the board of directors to review the economic effects of the HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria pandemics on the company’s business strategy, and its initiatives to date, and to report to shareholders within six months following the 2004 annual meeting. This report will identify the impacts of these pandemics on the company.
Another approach to socially responsible investing is to screen out of investment portfolios those companies whose values conflict with your own. For instance, the Springfield Dominicans do not invest in companies that support the nuclear arms industry, produce weapons of mass destruction, tobacco-related businesses, or pharmaceutical companies that produce abortifacients or contraceptives.
This article first appeared in Just WORDS,
Spring 2002, vol 2, no. 2.
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