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NEW YORK (RNS) Sister Patricia Daly is a Dominican nun who has been lobbying corporations to be socially responsible for so long that she has a rich trove of stories about battling recalcitrant execs and pushing faith-based resolutions at shareholder meetings.
But one of her favorites dates from just a few years ago when she was at a conference on human trafficking and an official from General Electric addressed the gathering.
“For many years if anyone from General Electric would see Sister Pat on the streets of New York they would cross the street to avoid her,” the GE executive recalled.
“Today, I knew she was going to be here and I looked for her at breakfast.”
That story, said Daly – now emeritus director of the New Jersey-based Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment – is indicative of the sea change in relations between the corporate world and faith-based groups like hers that in the 1970s spearheaded the movement for socially responsible investing.
“Today we have a really great working relationship, and I think we can say that about more companies than not,” Daly said. “We are trusted at the table.”
Critical to the success of the movement is the fact that corporations are not simply tolerating activists such as Daly.
Instead, they increasingly see the socially responsible agenda as good business; and, perhaps more important, so do investment firms that are responding to the growing demand for portfolios that reflect a client’s values while also making money as effectively as any other investment.
That’s why Daly was relating her story in a conference room in the Bank of America headquarters in midtown Manhattan as part of a recent two-day meeting organized by the banking giant’s wealth management division, Merrill Lynch.
The goal of the Faith Consistent Investing Forum was to bring together “practitioners” in the field – members of faith-based organizations charged with implementing an investment portfolio that reflects an organization’s faith or values – as well as financial professionals who wanted to learn more about the growing socially responsible investing, or SRI, sector. Continue reading
Sources
- Religion News Service article by David Gibson, a national reporter for RNS and an award-winning religion journalist, author and filmmaker.
- Image: New York Times
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