February 1, 2011 Meeting – Carleton Responsible Investment Committee

Location: Upper Sayles

Time: 12:00 pm

Secretary: Claire Milsted

CRIC minutes for February 1, 2011

Open meeting

At convocation, Kirsten told people they could come to this week’s meeting if they were interested. We also put an ad in the Noon News Bulletin. However, at the appointed time (12:15), no interested students showed up.

Convocation

This past Friday, Amy Domini spoke at Convocation. She had many interesting things to say and we enjoyed meeting her and talking to her.

She brought up two issues that we had not spent a lot of time thinking about: the importance of information availability and co-sponsoring.

People seemed interested; this is a good sign.

Preparation for meeting with trustees

We are meeting with the trustees on Thursday, February 10^th.

Next week, we will rehearse our presentation for them.

We should figure out what the trustees’ backgrounds are so we can know our audience.

The two most important things to remember when presenting to the trustees are that the trustees want to hear hard facts and that they care about Carleton’s financial well-being.

There are also some recent news items that we may want to bring up—for example, the use of expired tear gas (which is more dangerous than non-expired) in Egypt is probably relevant to the Raytheon resolution. Also, there was a recent article in the New York Times about hydraulic fracturing: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/business/energy-environment/01gas.html?_r=1&ref=business.

We should also look out for last-minute withdrawal of resolutions.

Conference

Kirsten and Fadi are going to a responsible investment conference on February 25^th in New York City. We could use publicize this, perhaps in the Carletonian, and use it to initiate dialogue with students.

They will try to learn more about some of the “back burner” issues that we may be addressing in the spring.

Possibilities for spring term

We could plan to file a resolution ourselves. Of course, this would mean meeting with the trustees twice—once in the fall for them to agree to sponsor the resolution, and once in the winter to ask them to vote for it. Another possibility is co-sponsoring.

We could petition to create a screen on military/defense companies. Other universities, such as Columbia, do screening (Columbia screens for Darfur and Tobacco).

We could also work on transparency.