Location: Upper Sayles
Time: 8:30 am
Secretary: Claire Milsted
Successful Meeting with Trustees: Last Thursday, members of CRIC met with the board of trustees. The trustees approved all of our resolutions. They agreed to try the new proxy voting policy for one year, and at the end of the year, we will deliver a full report on all the similar resolutions that came up for voting, along with a summary of the results of these votes. This information will help them decide whether they want to keep the policy going.
Quick recap of Macalaster meeting:Last Saturday, some members of CRIC met with members of the Macalaster Student Endowment Responsibiltiy Committee (SERC). SERC operates very differently from CRIC because the Macalaster endowment is only 2% custodied stock holdings, and most of this is small companies. As a result, they are trying to set up a special socially responsible fund. They may also decide to work with a british firm, Hermes, a European group that helps shareholders be socially responsible. They aren’t used to working with small pools of money, so the issue of how much Macalaster would pay for their service is uncertain. We also discussed a future meeting with Dan Apfel and possibly Martin Bourqui of the Responsible Endowments Coalition. Tentatively, this visit will be sometime between April 2-4.
Plans for the proxy policy:Since the trustees approved the policy for this year, one of our main priorities should be implementing the policy. For now, Bakhtawar will be in charge of looking through the new resolutions and contacting the investment office. We should also contact the investment office to see how we should go about this to minimize inconvenience to them. We can set up a google doc to keep track of the resolutions we send to them.
SRI fund:Jason recently contacted us about the possibility of an SRI fund for alumni to donate to. Apparently, Oberlin set up an SRI fund but nobody donated to it. Vassar, who we had thought had such a fund, apparently does not.
Dan Apfel visit:Since we couldn’t send anyone to the REC conference this year, perhaps we can use the money that we would have spent on that during Dan Apfel or Martin Bourqui’s visit. We may need to pay for transportation, accomodations and food. We should write a budget proposal for this.