The Shareholder Commons

An article from our CEO explaining how accountants can save the world.

Our CEO will be speaking on manager selection at next week's #PRIinPerson. Let us know if you would like to schedule a meeting with him or our CSO Sara E. Murphy during the conference.

Are you going to #PRIinPerson? Join me and Ananya Mukherjee and Meredith R. Benton of Whistle Stop Capital and Claudia Barbarano of DLA Piper for a discussion of how investors can improve returns by holding tech companies responsible for privacy and other issues. We will be discussing the #FinanceFocusedStrategyInitiative, launched by the philanthropic network #NetGainPartnership (funded by Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, Mozilla, Skoll Foundation, Open Society Foundations and Wallace Global Fund). See you at 9:30 am, October 8, at the Intercontinental Toronto

Our Chief Strategy Officer Sara E. Murphy will be speaking about #SystemStewardship at the ICGN Global Stewardship Forum in London on Friday. If you'll be attending, check out her session at 16:00 and go say hi!

Are you going to #ClimateWeek? Our CEO Rick Alexander will be speaking at the Sierra Club Foundation's Shifting Trillions Forum on September 25. Go see him and the terrific lineup of speakers! #ShiftingTrillions #SystemStewardship

Investors need to refine their tools to help them steward companies away from harmful behavior. In our latest newsletter, we discuss some of the tools we’ve devised to help investors with this task: https://lnkd.in/eiCRRjvH #SystemStewardship #AssetManagement #ProxyVoting #FiduciaryDuty

Our CEO on animal agriculture and system stewardship

Welcome to our first fall update of Portfolios on the Ballot (POTB), which highlights systems-first initiatives going to a vote at shareholder meetings. While there are many fewer shareholder meetings in the fall, our August POTB digest is full of updates. Read on to learn more about an important vote at Darden, a reminder about the surveys **closing soon** for ISS | Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass, Lewis & Co., and read a new model RFP we've put together for investors seeking #systemstewardship in their #proxyvoting advice. https://lnkd.in/g-TTufmN And don't forget to sign up to get news about POTB 2025's spring launch: https://lnkd.in/g6DgqUgU

We've just filed our exempt solicitation regarding Item 7 on Darden's proxy card, a shareholder proposal asking the company to follow World Health Organization guidelines on use of antimicrobials in food-producing animals. Darden is the largest restaurant operator in the U.S. full-service space; its policies thus have tremendous influence on the market as a whole. The proposal, which we filed on behalf of Mercy Investment Services, aims to protect an essential component of modern medicine that supports a thriving economy: Darden opposes the proposal on false or irrelevant grounds:   Darden says its existing #AntimicrobialResistance (“AMR”) policies are “reasonable and responsible.” #AMR is increasing at an alarming clip, creating expanding economic damage and consequent threat to the value of diversified portfolios, and Darden's policies and performance fall dramatically short of what it would take to mitigate the risk to its diversified shareholders. Darden posits a false choice between antibiotics use reduction and animal welfare. Antimicrobials reduction and animal welfare are but two legs of a three-legged stool. The third is cost. We show that it's in diversified investors’ best interest that Darden incur potentially higher costs to promote an animal husbandry system that does not degrade the essential resources on which we all rely for our survival.   Read on to learn more: https://lnkd.in/ecUyPp4t #SystemStewardship Kim Farrant Akaash Sachdeva Sonya Sawtell-Rickson HESTA Maria Larsson Ortino Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) Caroline Le Meaux Edouard Dubois Amundi Emma Henningsson Emma Berntman, PhD FAIRR Initiative Abigail Herron Aviva Investors Caroline Boden Wellcome Trust Jeremy Knox