Location: Upper Sayles

Time: 3:30 pm

Present Divya Sabanayagam, Amanda Savitt, Joe Concannon, Fadi Hakim, Kristen Vellinger, Fred Rogers, David Tompkins, Chris Clark, Joel Weisberg

Absent David Schlosser

Secretary: Claire Milsted

Applications

We still do not know when the application process for new student members will occur.  We have been in contact with Isaac Hodes, and he knows how many new members we need.  Once the applications are in, we will need to consult about which candidates we want to recommend to the CSA, who are the ones making the official decision.

It is important that we spread the word about this.  Joe C. put slips in the mailboxes of people he thought would be interested.  We should also contact members of groups such as MPIRG who might be interested in our work.

We also need new faculty members, but we will have to wait until other committees such as the Education and Curriculum Committee have been filled.

3M meeting

Joel, Kristen, and Fadi went to the 3M shareholders meeting along with students from Macalaster to advocate for the 3M political contributions resolution that the trustees approved.

Since most of the votes had already been cast, our questions probably did not have an effect on the final vote; however, we are glad we went because we started a conversation about 3M’s political contributions.

Meeting with Mr. Wally Weitz

Joel, Kristen, and Fadi also met with Mr. Wally Weitz of the investment committee.   He seemed receptive to the ideas we brought up (increased access to portfolio information, occasional dialogue with fund managers over SRI issues).  However, he believes that he is the most open to these measures of all the members of the investment committee.

We also ran these issues past Andy Christensen and Jason Matz, who also seemed receptive.

Next year

Next year the composition of CRIC will be different; many people are leaving; this means that it is important for us to set goals.

Perhaps we could increase our level of communication with companies whose proxies we vote, telling them why we voted.

We could work more closely with other similar institutions, particularly the one at Macalaster.  We should probably send people to the REC again.

We could also visit colleges that do not have similar institutions and encourage them to create them.

We could bring in another speaker, possibly Tim Smith of Walden Asset Management.

It is important to consider what would constitute success in these areas.  Influencing changes in corporate behavior and helping to expand the SRI universe or increase awareness of SRI would definitely be a success, but perhaps there are smaller things that we would like to accomplish.

Raising Awareness

There are several things we could do next year to raise awareness.  We will probably do the survey next year, and we could use that as a vehicle to get people to check out what we do.  We could also do a townhall-type meeting on the endowment.

We might also want to change our website to include more details on what we do and what ventures we have been successful in.

SRI Comps

A Carleton econ major recently did his comps on environmental principles in corporate governance.  It was published in the Undergraduate Economics Review.  Amanda or Divya will send it to the CRIC listserv.