racial justice Archives - Page 4 of 5

2021 Shareholder Advocacy Review: The Winds at Our Back

General, Impact Reports / By Michael Kramer

Natural Investments remained active in advocacy efforts in the past year to bring about needed improvements to the economic system while fostering equity and justice for women and people of color. We continued to engage major corporations on their policies and practices, funneled more capital to traditionally marginalized populations and educated policymakers about appropriate oversight

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Spotlight: Seed Commons

General, Newsletter Archive / By Nicole Middleton

Putting Non-Extractive Finance into Practice When investors hear the word “cooperative” it should immediately convey the idea of working together toward a common goal. Headquartered in New York City and working in communities across the country, Seed Commons is a cooperative, or democratically run financial organization, that is reimagining finance and lending. It uses non-extractive

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Indigenous Representation Matters

Advocacy & Policy, General / By Sylvia Panek

In 2007, when I worked at The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF)— The national association for socially responsible investing (SRI) firms and professionals—I became the staff liaison for the Investors and Indigenous Peoples Working Group (IIPWG). One of IPWG’s main campaigns at the time was asking companies and investors to pressure the

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Invested In Racism – Asset Manager Woke-Washing

Advocacy & Policy, General / By Nicole Middleton

So you have money invested with Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street, or Fidelity, and you recently heard that these Asset Managers have failed to utilize their power as large shareholders of publicly traded companies to address structural racism. You don’t want your money held at, or managed by a Company that is supporting voter suppression and

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Shareholder Advocacy Review – Winter 2022

Advocacy & Policy, General / By Michael Kramer

We finally get to take some victory laps! After years battling the previous administration, we are finally seeing executive branch actions that roll back its archaic rules and guidance that clearly benefited corporations and not investors. SUCCESSES The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), for example, recently issued new guidance addressing the criteria by which shareholders

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Black Economic Self-Determination with Ed Whitfield

General, Resilient Living / By Kate Poole

Natural Investments hosted a webinar called “Black Economic Self-Determination: To Move Forward We Must Understand The Past” with Ed Whitfield of Seed Commons. Reconstruction, the period that followed the Civil War, was a time when attempts were made to repair our country and our economy from slavery. Reconstruction failed, and set us up for what

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2020: A Year of Transformation

Company News, Impact Reports / By Michael Kramer

Crisis and opportunity have an interesting partnership. They don’t always go together, but when they do, they can catalyze powerful change in individuals, countries, and human civilization. Many forces converged in 2020 to create such a dynamic—a global pandemic, heightened attention to racism, extreme weather events and accompanying natural disasters, the disruption of democratic norms

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Putting Equity at the Center of our Organizational Culture

Company News, General / By Carrie Van Winkle

Natural Investments as a firm has been on its own path of social justice since it began. It’s the core of our mission. And yet in the area of racial equity, we know there is much more that we can and want to accomplish. Our natural focus is external, in that we are always looking

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Spotlight: RUNWAY

General, Impact Reports / By Nicole Middleton

RUNWAY was founded in 2017 by leaders in the women of color entrepreneurship ecosystem to help provide “friends and family”- style capital, expertise, and mentorship to Black businesses who are vitally important to the communities they serve yet continue to face many barriers to building their businesses. Since launching its first pilot program in partnership

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Transforming Systemic Inequity

General, Resilient Living / By Malaika Maphalala

2020 will go down in history as a year of profound disruption. One crisis after another exposed the mortal consequences of racial inequities––beginning with a pandemic in which people of color were far more likely to die than white Americans and a series of brutal police killings of unarmed Black civilians. These painful events spurred

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