Location: Upper Sayles

Time: 8:30 am

Present Ben Bedore, Joe Concannon, Maile Cupo, Danette DeMann, Ellen Farnham, Daniel Groll, Fadi Hakim, Sara Hooker, Forrest McKnight.

Absent Bakhtawar Chaudhary, Chris Clark, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Duncan Sallstrom, Fred Rogers

Secretary: Claire Milsted

New Members

We have two new members, Maile Cupo ’14 and Ben Bedore ’13.  They introduced themselves.  We briefly discussed what CRIC does.  There is a small inconvenience: our charter only allows five student members, so in order to officially add Maile and Ben to the committee, we will need to get the CSA to revise our charter.

Ideas regarding SRI for fund managers

Ben was at our dinner with Dan Apfel, and he brought up two ideas that came up there.  The first idea is that the investment office could create a guideline saying that if faced with a choice between two funds with equal risks and returns, they will choose the socially responsible fund.  The second idea is that we could add questions about ESG principles to the Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ) that fund managers fill out before we hire them.

These ideas could be unpopular with the investment office and might not accomplish much, so we should weigh the pros and cons before we invest political capital in them.

3M shareholder meeting

There is a 3M shareholder meeting at 10 AM on Tuesday, May 8th.  Macalaster got tickets to the meeting but do not own shares.  We do own shares, so they agreed to give their tickets to us.  Fadi and maybe Sara will go to this meeting.

Future Plans

We discussed plans and possible goals for the future. 

We will keep track of our proxies by making a giant spreadsheet.   We delegated who will enter which year’s proxies into the spreadsheet.

There are summer organizing workshops in Wisconsin and New Jersey; we might want to send younger CRIC members to these workshops.

We need to get new faculty to join CRIC.  Daniel Groll is going to be away next year, and the former CRIC member we had been considering to replace him was appointed to another committee.

We could conduct a survey next year.

We could talk to other REC institutions about setting up better communication on the internet, such as a REC wiki.

We could lobby for putting some money in an SRI fund.  If we decide to do this, we should contact Middlebury and/or Dickinson to talk about their recent decision to do this.

We could lobby for putting questions about ESG principles on the DDQ.