Location: Upper Sayles

Time: 8:30 am

Present Bakhtawar Chaudhary, Joe Concannon, Chris Clark, Danette DeMann, Ellen Farnham, Daniel Groll, Fadi Hakim, Sara Hooker, Forrest McKnight, Duncan Sallstrom, Fred Rogers.

Absent Mihaela Czobor-Lupp

Secretary: Claire Milsted

Short-term plans

Some of our resolutions have been withdrawn. We will note this in our spreadsheet.

Forrest passed around a card that he made for Kristen. We all signed it and we will give it to her as a token of our appreciation.

Discussion with Dan Apfel

Dan Apfel of the Responsible Endowments Coalition is visiting Carleton today. We briefly revisited the issue of Hermes, the European firm that engages on behalf of pension funds and other entities that want to be socially responsible. We agreed that their proposed rate was too expensive.

Dan briefly discussed the role of the REC. He mentioned that there are about 30 entities like CRIC among the REC schools. However, there is an incredible diversity in terms of what these committees do. Some are student-only; some are a mixture of students, faculty and staff; some schools have a student SRI group as well as an official committee. Dan advised that we should try to engage more students.

Loyola University of Chicago is a particularly interesting case. Because they have ties to the Jesuits and an administration sympathetic to SRI, they have been able to engage with companies in a much more meaningful way than other schools, through conference calls and proxy filing.

There are ways that we can engage with companies outside of proxy voting. Since the votes are anonymous, it might be useful to contact the company in question and tell them how we voted and why. Petitioning the SEC is another thing that responsible investors might be interested in. In the future, it might be helpful for several institutions within the REC to work together as a block; that way, they are more noticeable to the corporate leadership. REC has been trying to do this with hydraulic fracturing (a petition went out last year) but it is a controversial issue and they were not able to garner as much support as they had hoped for.

We also talked briefly about SRI funds at other institutions. Middlebury and Dickenson recently put a piece of their pooled endowment into an SRI fund. Vassar has also invested in an SRI fund. However, these are both very small investments.

Later today, Dan will have lunch with some people from CRIC. He will also meet with some people from the investment office along with a few CRIC members. He will also be giving a talk at the Athenaeum.