Natural Investments, through its involvement with the Shareholder Rights Group, met with SEC Chairman Paul Atkins earlier this year. We expressed concerns regarding the commission’s decision to eliminate its written responses to companies wanting to exclude shareholder proposals from ballots, noting that it deprives companies and investors clarity about the permissibility of proposals and works against the interests of investors who wish to vote on numerous valid proposals. We also shared case law on stockholder proposals that refutes the Chairman’s opinion that Delaware law doesn’t
support shareholder resolutions. Such evidence may become critical in legal challenges to SEC attempts to change its rules without Congressional approval. Additional research and resources on this issue can be found at the Investor Rights Forum.

We also responded to the SEC’s request for comments regarding its proposed changes to Regulation S-K, which comprises the various disclosures companies must file with the SEC, including material risks investors should know about that could affect their financial condition. We highlighted the importance of shareholder engagement and proposals in seeking additional voluntary disclosures, as they often lead to additional internal measurement, analysis, and board-level attention regarding the extent to which issues constitute material risk. This information is a critical factor for investor decision-making, the filing of shareholder proposals, and proxy voting. We specifically urged the SEC to:

• Require companies to disclose material risk factors and management’s analysis of these risks, including environmental and social risks;

• Allow shareholder proposals to surface issues and risk relevant to their companies;
• Affirm that substantial support for a shareholder proposal that constitutes evidence of materiality;
• And maintain the shareholder proposal process as a right of all investors, not one reserved only for the largest shareholders.

We signed onto an Americans for Financial Reform letter to the SEC opposing its proposed repeal of a Biden-era transparency rule that required funds to define the terms they use in investment fund titles, remove materially deceptive or misleading name terms, ensure that at least 80% of a fund’s holdings align with its title, and indicate which investments qualify for the 80% criteria. Repealing the rule will make it more difficult for investors to understand what they own.

We submitted a comment letter to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created by Congress to oversee the audits of public companies. The administration is proposing to weaken oversight by only focusing on validating the quality control systems of registered public accounting firms, as opposed to directly reviewing them. This level of oversight is inconsistent with the law as drafted and would undermine investor protection.

In the face of what many consider to be politically-motivated fraud charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, we signed letters along with our industry colleagues to Schwab, Fidelity, and Vanguard asking them to revise their policy regarding their decisions to temporarily restrict charitable contributions via investors’ Donor Advised Funds custodied at these firms. The firms have indicated their policy is apolitical and has long pertained to criminally indicted organizations. We urged the firms to leave these types of decisions to donors.

We sent a joint letter with our colleagues to Meta to encourage more robust content moderation policies and stronger governance structure, oversight mechanism, and board-level accountability “to manage material legal, regulatory, operational, and reputational risks associated with content moderation failures.” This is particularly important in areas of geopolitical conflict, such as the SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa), but also anywhere where political extremism poses a threat to stability. The company faces scrutiny for its inconsistent approach to freedom of expression, political participation, and non-discrimination—and for taking a biased approach to censorship that may passively condone civil and human rights violations. We are hoping for constructive engagement on these issues to reduce material operational risk and the formation of independent mechanisms for content moderation decisions.

We supported a shareholder resolution at PayPal regarding its decision to deny Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza access to the company’s services. The resolution calls on the PayPal Board to establish a policy ensuring that people in conflict zones, such as Palestine, do not suffer discriminatory exclusion from PayPal’s financial services.

It further requests that the company evaluate the economic impact of its current policy on the affected populations, as well as on the company’s finances, operations, and reputation. The proposal received 41% shareholder support.

We signed a letter to Amazon to demand that the company establish a fair pregnancy accommodations policy. More than 1,000 pregnant and postpartum Amazon workers have reported serious medical and economic consequences due to the company’s lack of accommodation. This is potentially a violation of the Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. Thus far, the state of New Jersey has filed a legal discrimination complaint against the company alleging that it denied or delayed responses to reasonable accommodation requests and retaliated against workers who sought them, including placing pregnant workers on unpaid leave and terminating them if they could not meet productivity standards while pregnant. A class-action lawsuit was also filed this year in New York regarding a similar lack of accommodation for disabled workers. These cases are pending.

We signed the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility’s Investor Statement on Excessive Executive Compensation, which notes that most CEO
pay is excessive (the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at large companies is now 300:1, compared to 21:1 in 1965). This disparity has not historically translated into higher returns for investors. Justification for CEO compensation is typically based on performance targets that are often opaque, low, and manipulated by consulting firms operating in complicity with the executives. More reasonable, comprehensive, and transparent executive pay frameworks are needed. In addition, the statement supports living wages for all employees and wealth-building opportunities for them to share in the success of their companies via profit-sharing, employee ownership, and share purchase agreements.

We wrote a letter with our colleagues to the board of JP Morgan Chase regarding the apparent complicity of its executives in facilitating the sex trafficking of children by Jeffrey Epstein and what appears to be a systemic risk management and fiduciary oversight failure to flag concerning transactions. While the company has paid settlements to victims, additional remediation is necessary to restore public trust in the company, such as personnel changes, governance reforms, compensation claw-backs, new oversight structures, additional contributions to survivor support, and the establishment of a special board committee to conduct a forensic audit of $1.2 billion in suspicious transactions over 16 years. We are also calling on
Congress and the Department of Justice to investigate whether the bank deliberately withheld suspicious information from the Treasury Department, which would be a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.

We wrote a letter with our colleagues to the board of Magnum Ice Cream Company, a newly created spinoff from Unilever that owns Ben & Jerry’s. The merger agreement in 2000 established an independent board at Ben & Jerry’s with defined authority to safeguard its mission, brand integrity, and product quality. However, Magnum has consistently and systematically disregarded this contractual promise of independence. We are requesting validation of how Magnum will honor and operationalize the independent board agreement, including how decision-making authority will function in practice and what steps are being taken to reinforce that structure going forward.

A Resistance and Resilience Toolkit

There are many ways to reject the priorities of the current administration and act in alignment with our values.

• Access and change the leadership
• Vote with your money
• Help those affected
• Protect yourself and your rights

ACCESS AND CHANGE THE LEADERSHIP

Our political system is representative, so its foundation is based on having high-quality people in positions of authority to make good decisions on
our behalf. We need to participate in the political system to assure this, not just by voting, but by posing important questions of and expressing our
views to candidates at all levels of government. Building relationships with elected and appointed officials is an important part of our democracy, and
they need and generally want our input.

The most important rule of thumb: Reach out to your representatives, and make sure to let them know you’re a voter in their district or state. There is also a clear hierarchy of value to the method of correspondence: Handwritten letters are most meaningful and are usually compiled into a binder. The next best are direct phone calls or emails to specific staff or the non-public email/phone number—this kind of access comes through developing relationships with the office by attending events. The third most meaningful is a phone call to the district or state office general phone line, followed by the general line to the Washington, D.C., office—both of which are usually staffed by interns. Finally, there is the general email on the House/Senate website. Insiders on Capitol Hill say online petitions, chain letters, or anything that automatically generates a form letter are the lowest valued form of communication.

We can also help register others to vote through your local political party or via national organizations such as Head Count, Rock the Vote, All Voting is Local, and When We All Vote. Voices for Racial Justice identifies opportunities to encourage civic engagement in Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, while Fair Fight Action addresses voter suppression across the country.

Oath can help you target your financial support to the candidates and issues based on your values and priorities.

We can also run for office ourselves, or seek appointments by elected officials to task forces, committees, and boards to help shape policy. Organizations like Run for Something, Emily’s List, She Should Run, and Contest Every Race are actively cultivating candidates.

VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY

Supporting our values through our financial investments has become increasingly popular, though it takes effort to stay current on the companies to support or avoid (based on their response to the current political situation). More than 100 multinational companies—including Costco, Toyota, FedEx, Revlon, Alcoa, Del Monte, Bumble Bee Foods, J. Crew, GoPro, and Staples—have filed complaints in the U.S. Court of International Trade, for example, to contest the emergency tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

We can join, support, and contribute to people in need and those being marginalized.

Other companies have preemptively modified their practices to avoid government scrutiny or otherwise gone along with the current regime: Target changed its DEI policy; Tesla’s CEO played a vital role in DOGE; Meta has enabled rampant misinformation, abuse, and identity-based attacks (leading to the “Lights Out Meta” boycott campaign); Home Depot allowed ICE raids at stores across the country and changed its DEI policy; Apple supported the presidential inauguration and removed ICEBlock from its app store; and Amazon GovCloud and Palantir Technologies have data partnerships with ICE. For information on corporate complicity with the administration, Goods Unite Us is an excellent resource. At Natural Investments, we are also monitoring companies objecting to organized labor: Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Wal-Mart, Tesla, T-Mobile, and other union-busting companies tracked by Labor Lab.

Move your credit cards, savings, and checking accounts to values-aligned entities with the help of Better Banking Options, particularly local credit unions and community banks. Natural Investments’ reserves and many of our clients’ deposits are at Hope Credit Union in the rural South, but there are hundreds of similar financial institutions around the county listed in the Opportunity Finance Network’s community development financial institution (CDFI) database.

Invest responsibly over the long term. This is Natural Investments’ primary focus. The markets have shown resilience, even in a state of heightened
and persistent volatility—despite radical changes recently in tariffs and other trade policies, interest rates, tax rates, monetary policy, industry
regulations, environmental regulations, labor (via immigration and anti-diversity policy), and employment in the tech sector. Long-term trends
and economic data are fundamental to investing, and the discipline to look past what are likely to be temporary phenomena may prove to be the most resilient approach.

Maintaining a diversified portfolio helps mitigate some of the political and economic risks, while investing in the green economy, BIPOC enterprises
and communities, responsible infrastructure, and domestic manufacturing can and should continue. As we wrote 12 years ago in our book The Resilient Investor, being flexible and adaptable while diversifying into local and tangible assets may also prove prudent for some investors. Personal,
social, and tangible assets that are not correlated with the global markets can be important elements of a resilient life plan. Your financial advisor can
explore these opportunities with you.

HELP THOSE AFFECTED

We can join, support, and contribute to people in need and those being marginalized. Mutual Aid Hub lists initiatives in most areas of the country. We
can also join and support entities actively resisting the administration:

• The American Sustainable Business Network is a coalition of small businesses.
• Freedom Economy, of which Natural Investments is a member, prepares non-profit organizations and mission-aligned individual investors and businesses for government scrutiny and lawsuits.
• Democracy Forward uses the law to build collective power.
• The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Prison Policy Center are mounting legal challenges against the government, as is Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is fighting the Administration’s efforts to impose Christian nationalism upon 110,000 federal USDA employees.
• About 300 organizations have sued the Administration in the past year, such as the ACLU, which has ongoing campaigns and initiatives to protect civil liberties and rights.
• The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, As You Sow, Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, NAACP,
  League of United Latin American Citizens, League of Women Voters, Brennan Center for Justice, and the American Foreign Service Association have also sued the Administration recently; look into their cases, and if you like what they’re doing, support them.
• Public employee unions such as AFSCME and AFGE, in conjunction with the AFL-CIO, have also filed lawsuits against the Administration to reject its reclassification of workers by the government to reduce and remove their labor rights. Lawfare tracks current lawsuits against the administration, including those by unions, which need our support more than ever.
• Indivisible has organizing groups in all 50 states focused on resisting authoritarianism in America. Outlets like PBS and NPR provide an unbiased accounting of what’s transpiring and deserve our support in the face of federal budget cuts.
• Charitable organizations that lost significant funding from recent federal budget cuts include the International Rescue Committee, Save the
  Children Federation, Mercy Corps, Education Development Center, and CARE—not to mention countless small, local, and/or regional organizations. The Urban Institute and the Council on Criminal Justice are tracking the impact of these cuts on domestic organizations.

PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR RIGHTS

Political efforts to classify specific support for people of color as racially discriminatory are not new in this country, but the administration now has the majority of the Supreme Court on its side. While recent rulings have suggested that affirmative action and similar approaches don’t have constitutional legitimacy (after all, during the drafting of our nation’s founding document, only white male landowners were considered free and equal citizens), the work to rectify centuries of institutional oppression must continue despite these current blows.

Under current conditions, legal advisors have suggested that people and institutions modify their public-facing language to avoid being targeted by Republicans in government.

Those that have long been serious about ESG are seeing an increase in their assets.

Given these hurdles, how might we support people and communities who continue to face entrenched institutionalized bias and oppression? We can and must continue to support equity and justice work, doubling down where we can while taking care to protect our efforts through subtle adjustments in front-facing language. We understand that that fostering compassion, respect, and belonging for people of marginalized identities does not mean providing favorable treatment.

Restrictions to investor freedom are also a core aspect of the administration’s agenda. The right of socially responsible investors and the investment
professionals they hire to integrate environmental, social, and governance risks into the investment decision-making process is under attack by Republicans in Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The current administration erroneously categorizes our work as a non-financial, political activity. While the SEC exists to protect investors, the current Administration has introduced policies to protect corporations and restrict the rights of shareholders to communicate with the companies they own about material financial risks worthy of board and management consideration.

Shareholders now face significant obstacles to posting their resolutions to other shareholders.New policies have allowed companies to ignore
shareholder concerns. GOP members of Congress and appointees of the current President have politicized the normal, mainstream practice of evaluating company risk by suggesting that certain issues have nothing to do with financial performance. Their concerns—none of which are
backed by evidence—are driven by their claim that liberal activists have taken control of the financial system and are bending it to fulfill their agenda.

This nearsightedness has caused GOP leaders to make concerted efforts to curtail investor freedom. They are targeting investors’ right to make decisions regarding their pension plans, to put proposals before shareholders for a vote, and to engage proxy advisor services they hire
to provide insights and recommendations on shareholder ballots. This imposition of conservative political values onto the financial system stems
from the false belief that some investors, and investment professionals, are not fully dedicated to maximizing financial return. Curtailing investor
freedom is a desperate measure driven by powerful economic interests that have lost favor among many investors due to their inherent financial risks. The fossil fuel industry in particular faces an existential threat and is therefore attempting to prevent investors from bailing on their stocks. Fossil fuel
companies continue to make massive campaign contributions to legislators who will support their agenda.

The fight to preserve dying industries is not new in this country, though the concentration of corporate and political power has accelerated this tension. Some investment firms have caved in the face of such blatant political manipulation: State Street, Fidelity, and Blackrock have all publicly
renounced environmental, social, and governance (ESG) language in their prospectuses and fund names so they can continue to do business as usual
with state and federal governments. Others, like Natural Investments, are standing firm.

In a way, this has been a clarifying moment. It has exposed the firms that pretended to care about these issues as they abandon their substandard, greenwashing approach. Meanwhile, those that have long been serious about ESG are seeing an increase in their assets, according to a 2025 article
in ESG Dive. Additionally, USSIF’s biannual Trends Report noted that 84% of the 270 investment firms n its poll have either maintained or increased their allocations to sustainable and responsible investing in the past year.

Morningstar found similar sentiment among conventional investment professionals in its 2025 State of ESG Data Survey Report of global asset owners, asset managers, banks, and other financial institutions. The report notes that nearly 75% of survey respondents are continuing to pursue sustainable, responsible, and impact investment strategies. Some are maintaining them as they are, some are increasing their commitments, and others
are continuing to do it while reframing how they describe it. Only 2% of those surveyed indicated they were ceasing the approach.

In fact, 60% expect market participation in ESG investing to increase over the next three years—an indicator of confidence amid palpable, short-term
uncertainty. As such, investor commitment to sustainable investing remains strong, because the profession treats ESG as an element of competitive
advantage, a central lens for identifying long-term value, and a strategy for managing risk.

THE THREAT TO SHAREHOLDER RIGHTS

Earlier this year, the SEC suspended its longstanding practice of issuing written decisions on companies’ shareholder proposal exclusions. The change allows companies to exclude shareholder proposals from proxy ballots. The unsurprising result: companies excluded a variety of material issues from ballots this year, according to Shareholder Proposals and Corporate Governance in a Season of Regulatory Uncertainty, a report by the Shareholder Rights Group (Natural Investments is a member).

The analysis illustrates that shareholders filed 20% fewer proposals this year, and the relevance of many of the issues were decided unilaterally
by companies in the absence of government intervention.

On the positive side, Disney, Apple, McDonald’s, Home Depot, and Columbia Sportswear included proposals or engaged with proponents, since the SEC would not rule on their materiality.

Shareholders filed six lawsuits to challenge company exclusions of proposals. While the suits show an encouraging appetite among shareholders
to fight for their rights, it must be noted that doing so requires the financial resources and institutional capacity to sue. According to the Shareholder Rights Group report cited above, the SEC’s abnegation of its traditional responsibility “both impeded shareholders’ ability to surface new, financially
relevant risks and disrupted the established corrective process that typically refines proposal language over time.” The report requests the restoration of the historically suitable process the SEC used to resolve proposal exclusion disputes and assure that investors and management continue to engage in thoughtful, productive dialogue regarding risks to companies.

The SEC and GOP attacks on the shareholder proposal process ignore its proven value to financial performance. A recent study by Jasmijn Vandenberk, The Value of Being Heard: Board Responsiveness to Shareholder Proposals, looked at more than 9,700 proposals to S&P 1500 firms over the course of 16 years. It found that proposals, whether they were voted upon or withdrawn, are similarly associated with higher firm value compared to omitted proposals. Responsiveness appears to be more valueenhancing when proposals are submitted by multiple shareholders, indicating that collective shareholder action plays a role in a positive outcome. These findings imply that regulators, companies, and shareholders should recognize that the shareholder proposal process can enhance firm value rather than impede it.

It is essential for those who believe in investor freedom to vigorously defend this longstanding, mainstream practice and fight misinformation with
facts and evidence. Shareholder Proposals: An Essential Investor Right, a report also published by the Shareholder Rights Group, provides irrefutable
evidence for how social and environmental proposals uncover material financial risks that can affect financial performance and share value.

If you wish to make your own voice known on this matter, an Action Network petition to defend shareholder rights to the SEC to protect shareholder
rights is currently active. Natural Investments also has industry and academic research proving that responsible investing has economic benefits. Feel
free to ask your advisor for such studies if you wish to share them.

DEFEND QUARTERLY REPORTING

The SEC has proposed that the quarterly public company reporting requirement be rescinded to save companies money and help more companies
go public. However, the Investor as Owner Subcommittee of the SEC’s own Investor Advisory Committee has weighed in against the proposal. Its draft recommendation suggests that ceasing the corporate quarterly reporting requirement would “deprive the markets of timely, material information,
and thereby undermine informed investor decision making and the efficient allocation of capital among public companies.”

The Committee suggests that the quarterly reporting cycle does not prevent companies from going public or investing in their own growth. Nor does reducing the frequency of reporting lead to in any meaningful cost savings to issuers. In fact, the committee suggests the elimination of quarterly
reporting would create inconsistencies that may negatively impact the quality of both investor and corporate investment decisions. If the SEC does not heed the advice of its own committee, it will be important for investors to submit comments on the proposed rule.

PROTEST THE RESCISSION OF CLIMATE-RELATED CORPORATE DISCLOSURES

The SEC is proposing a new rule that would rescind the 2024 SEC Climate Disclosure Rule, which was never implemented due to litigation. The majority members of the current SEC believe the agency does not have the statutory authority to implement the rule—and that it is unnecessary and
“overly burdensome and costly” to companies.

Once rule S7-2026-19 is posted to the Federal Register, anyone can file a comment protesting the rule during the next 60 days via comments on the SEC website. It would be ideal for millions of Americans to file comments to protest this rule.

FIGHTING RESTRICTIONS ON RETIREMENT FUNDS

The 2026 Economic Report of the President attempts to restrict the freedom of retirement funds to make investment choices. The report falsely equates ESG investing with poor financial performance. Based on this false correlation, the report mischaracterizes ESG investing as a breach of
fiduciary responsibility by investment managers and advisors.

The report asserts that environmentally-focused ESG investing reduced U.S. GDP by about 0.07% per year from 2016 to 2023. It uses this assertion to justify policies that would limit investors’ ability to incorporate ESG considerations in their investment decisions, including retirement plans. But the evidence on which the report claims to rely does not support that conclusion.

For some time, the federal government has acknowledged that the context in which the economy exists affects financial performance. While fiduciaries of pension plans (and all investments) must prioritize financial returns and act solely in investors’ interests, in 2022 the Department of Labor noted that riskreturn analysis may include the economic effects of climate change and other ESG factors. Years earlier, in 2010, the SEC’s climate-disclosure guidance also suggested that climate-related developments can have material effects on business operations.

Clearly, responsible investing has become a lightning rod, and Republicans do not wish to allow financial professionals to ascertain the range and severity of risks associated with their investment recommendations, even though their licenses require them to do so. When government draws unsubstantiated conclusions based on false assumptions about an industry, it has the potential to cause significant harm, in this case to investors—
not only by limiting their freedom to choose how to evaluate risk, but by suggesting that certain types of risk are somehow immaterial. We therefore must show lawmakers and regulators the research proving their conclusions to be false.