Location: Upper Sayles
Time: 12:00 am
Secretary: Claire Milsted
CRIC minutes for January 25, 2011
Meeting with Trustees
Our meeting with the trustees will be on Thursday, February 10, at 2:30 PM in the Alumni Guesthouse Meeting Room.
We will get 30 minutes total, and this should include a lot of time for the trustees to ask questions. How should we divide this time up? Our plan is for Kristen to talk for ten minutes and cover the entire report. During the remaining 20 minutes, trustees will be able to ask questions. Each CRIC member will answer the questions relating to the resolution(s) that he/she researched. This way the trustees will hear from different people on the CRIC.
We believe that the trustees are the same as last year except for the addition of two International Advisors (nonvoting members). Fred will send us a list of who is on the IC so that we can know for sure who it is.
We should practice our presentation before we go before the IC. Committee-members will be looking for reasonable fact-based arguments, as well as arguments about our interest as shareholders. Another important thing to remember is that resolutions should have a purpose beyond badgering the company at which they were filed. We need to defend this to the IC because they would not want to vote for badgering resolutions. This is very important to remember when dealing with the political contributions resolutions.
Report
Joel made a revised version with fixed numbering which he sent out early this morning. Some more revisions will be necessary—order is not standardized, resolutions are not always numbered and there are other organization issues.
Amanda’s year must be fixed-she is a senior not a junior.
Committee-members are busy and they may not have time to read the whole report; they may only skim. We need to make allowances for this fact in two ways: by getting the report in soon and by making it clear and well-organized.
We will re-order the resolutions so that they are grouped by category (environmental, governance, human rights). Also, resolutions that are the same proposal but at different corporations should be together.
The first two pages should not have page numbers. David T. knows how to fix this issue.
We will make these changes by 5 PM Thursday, and we will then send the report to Fred so that he can print it on his Carleton letterhead and send it to the trustees.
Convocation this Friday
The Amy Domini convocation is this Friday. We should think about what we want to talk to her about.
We could talk to her about initiating a proxy resolution ourselves, and about what type of work is involved. We could talk about the issue of our nondirect investments.We could ask about creating an SRI/ESG fund within the endowment where alumni could direct their donations.
We can use the convocation and the luncheon to initiate dialogue with students. We will invite people to come to our next CRIC meeting if they are interested.