We invite you to listen to this audiocast from Marcela Pinilla, our Director of Sustainable Investing, and hear about the issues she sees as the primary focus for Zevin Asset Management, including:
Racial equity
Climate change
Corporate governance
On the Front Lines of Shareholder Advocacy
What a year this has been for shareholder advocacy.
This season we reached a new peak in investor support for ESG (environmental, social, and governance)-related issues. Most of these majority votes during company annual meetings have been for shareholder proposals asking companies to evaluate and describe the rationale for their spending on direct and indirect lobbying activities.
How Can Investors Help Confront Racial Injustice?
Download a PDF of this Impact Brief
Here is an update of our 2017 paper on racial justice and investing, renewed to reflect more recent events, engagements, and developments that we are trying to press in our field.
Inequality and injustice based on race were founding economic realities of American life. Two centuries later, inequality, abuse, and discrimination are still present in every sector — in education, housing, healthcare, and policing. In spite of halting progress, our economy, and our capital markets specifically, are still systematic in failing BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities, continuing to extract value from them, and profiting — and thereby contributing to — their further marginalization and carceration. Not surprisingly, those conditions shape businesses’ risks and opportunities. This paper discusses integrating racial justice into investment — both with an analytical lens and an economic reality. Doing so helps us protect the value of our portfolios and channel our clients’ voices to help create positive change.
To read more download a PDF of this Impact Brief.
Amazon Needs Independent Leadership
In early April, the SEC ruled that our shareholder proposal urging Amazon to appoint an independent board chair can appear on the company's annual meeting ballot in late May. Amazon had challenged our proposal on spurious grounds, and our victory at the SEC means that investors will have a chance to confront the company's weak corporate governance and its wide-ranging social and environmental issues.
Responsible Investment and Divestment: Our Testimony
Another year has begun with climate catastrophe bearing down on our civilization. Two years after historic bushfires, Australia is now facing the worst flooding in decades. NATO is warning about an intensification of climate change’s effects, which could “lead to more extreme weather, to droughts and to flooding, force people to move, to more fierce competition about scarce resources, water, land.” This is already obvious for poor and marginalized communities like the “climate migrants” facing human rights violations at the US-Mexico border.