Responding to or Simply Staying Ahead of Shareholder Activism

Responding to or Simply Staying Ahead of Shareholder Activism 

The nuns who represent the Sisters of St. Francis have taken a very direct approach to assuring the performance of their retirement funds and at the same time they use their actions to enhance the greater good. Using the investments in their retirement funds as the stepping stone to influence change they have effectively become Wall Street s moral minority. 

Case Study in Shareholder Activism—the Sisters of St. Francis 

The Sisters of St. Francis formed a community to take up the cause of assuring corporate responsibility. Troubled by what they saw in businesses where they had invested their retirement funds, they formed a committee to combat these undesirable corporate developments. Working in coordination with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment, they mounted an offensive against some of the largest corporations in America. They have effectively boycotted Big Oil and even encouraged Big Tobacco to change its ways. 

A spokesman for a firm specializing in shareholder proxy votes once observed that an organization is never going to get any sympathy for cutting off a nun at the annual meeting. And with their moral authority, the Sisters of St. Francis were thought to have the capacity to gamer wide public attention to issues. 

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