Tactics and Strategies
Three Ways to Engage Companies that Impact your Community
1. Voting Proxies
Publicly traded companies operate in most of our communities - impacting our workforce, our environment, and our futures. Publicly traded companies are legally required to report to their shareholders. By owning shares in these companies, community members can exercise their shareholder rights in a variety of ways to help ensure corporate accountability, as well as practices that strengthen local communities.
If you own shares of publicly-traded companies, you can represent your values and community by regularly voting on issues raised in annual proxy statements, which can range from transparency on policies and practices to the health and safety of workers, executive compensation, environmental practices and policies of the company, and more.
Because the social and environmental practices of a company are ultimately bound to that company’s profits, shareholder resolutions help keep corporations responsible to their shareholders and stakeholders. Many of the United States’ largest companies, such as MacDonald’s, Walmart, and the Home Depot, adopted community-conscious policies and practices in direct response to proxy votes that reflected shareholder ballots cast in alignment with stakeholder concerns.
There are a variety of resources available to help shareholders and stakeholders align their investments with the values of their community, such as As You Sow’s 2019 Voting Proxy Guidelines.
A Proxy Vote is a ballot cast by a person or firm on behalf of a shareholder or group of shareholders.
2. Engage Corporate Management
Often community members might have direct holdings of a public company to exercise their shareholder rights, or a company may be privately owned and not subject to shareholder resolutions and votes.
When corporations are privately owned, there are still a variety of tools available for stakeholders to engage with the companies that are most impacting their communities. Because most of the value of US companies is derived from intangible assets like brand and reputation, many companies will respond to meaningful and organized petitions for change because not doing so risks tarnishing their reputation (and, hence, their company’s profits and value).
A simple letter to a corporation’s public relations or management team might bring awareness to an issue that was previously overlooked or misunderstood, and this tactic can prompt operational and policy changes at the corporate level. More often than not, however, you will need to enlist the help of like-minded individuals and organizations to attract and hold management’s attention.
Individuals can organize to petition both public and private companies that are negatively impacting their communities through a variety of channels:
• Enlist Advocacy Groups: Organizations like the Sierra Club, the Center for American Progress, and the Global Health Council have been instrumental in providing background research and visibility for community-based issues.
• Contact Local Politicians: If a corporation is negatively impacting a community, politicians should represent their constituency through dialogue and policy. A call from a local representative or official can go a long way in getting the attention of corporate management.
• Engage Shareholders: For publicly-traded corporations, organizations like As you Sow, ICCR, Proxy Impact and Aperio help advocate community-based issues among corporate shareholders.
3. File a New Shareholder Resolution
Perhaps you buy shares of a publicly-traded company and would like to advocate for cleaner waste disposal practices in your region, but you realize that no such measure of corporate resolution is currently available for proxy voting.
New shareholder resolutions are powerful tools to introduce your concerns to all corporate shareholders for their proxy votes and consideration. The primary criteria for filing a new shareholder resolution are:
Owning at least $2,000 or 1% in that company’s stock (whichever is less) for at least one year
Issuing the proposed resolution in 500 words or less
A lead filer or representative must be available to present the resolution in person at the company’s Annual General Meeting
The resolution cannot be based on false information or personal grievance, and cannot address the “ordinary business” of the company. However, resolutions may address social, environmental, or governance issues that could possibly have a material impact on the company (such as a tarnished brand from improperly disposing of waste in your community).
Often, shareholder resolutions are filed with the support and guidance of advocacy groups who help community members navigate the requirements and hurdles that may emerge. If a resolution is controversial for a company, management may attempt to block it from a vote by either deeming it out of scope or addressing the issue only partially.
Organizations like ICCR and As You Sow have been instrumental in helping communities and activists both organize their movement and issue new shareholder resolutions that reflect new or unaddressed concerns about corporate practices. Even if resolutions aren’t supported by a majority of shareholders, a resolution helps raise awareness among management, shareholders, and the general public, and many of the most impactful corporate policy changes occurred in response to resolutions that only received a minority vote.
2016 Shareholder Proposals by Issue
Source: Sustainable Investing, 2019