Oikocredit’s Investor Spotlight on Tim Brennan
Oikocredit featured UUA Treasurer and CFO, Timothy Brennan, in its December Investor Spotlight. Oikocredit is but one of the many community investments in the Unitarian Universalist Common Endowment Fund. Through community development, investors designate part of their portfolio for credit unions, non-profit banks, or funds that make loans to start-up enterprises in low-income communities. Such programs […]
Keeping The Pressure On Dow
Unbelievably another decade has passed since one of the most horrific industrial disasters in history occurred in Bhopal, India. What isn’t unbelievable is that shareholders are still calling for Dow to accept responsibility and to clean up the tons of toxic waste that contaminated the local water supply. The contamination is still posing health risks […]
Do You Know How Your Money Is Being Spent?
Today, the Sunlight Foundation released a report about the political spending of the top 200 politically active companies. They document billions of corporate lobbying that is turned into trillions of dollars of corporate welfare. The UUA has been fighting for companies to disclose this spending to shareholders so that shareholders will know how their money […]
October Monthly Commentary
Markets experienced a turbulent ride in October but wound up in a familiar place by month end with domestic equities positive and Treasury yields lower. A wave of volatility spurred by global growth concerns permeated through markets – first felt in currencies and then resulting in a sharp equity selloff early in the month. US […]
Shareholders Challenge Policies for Foreign-Based LGBT Workers
The UUA has joined a group of U.S. investors to press some of the nation’s largest publicly traded corporations urging them to extend their LGBT nondiscrimination policies and equal benefits policies to their employees abroad. The UUA is concerned about the highly varied and often harsh legal and cultural environments faced by LGBT communities in […]
Climate-Friendly Reinvestment: Opportunities and Challenges
As part of our efforts to incorporate climate considerations across our portfolio, the investment committee of the UUCEF has recently shifted some of our fixed-income investments to bond managers who include environmental factors in their decision-making process. These managers buy “green bonds” (those designed to support climate protection and other environmental initiatives) whenever possible. But […]
Climate Advocacy Success at Statoil
In late September, Norway’s Statoil ASA decided to shelve a multibillion-dollar oil sands project in northern Alberta for three years. The company’s decision came after intensive engagement with social investment firm Boston Common Asset Management (BCAM), one of the UUA’s managers. BCAM invested some of our portfolio in Statoil, and used that position to press […]
UUA President Responds to ALEC Attack
Last Friday, October 17, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sent out an email asking their supporters for funds to fight the “smear campaign” waged against them by the Unitarian Universalist Church. ALEC claims that we UUs wish to “silence competing ideas and speech” because we have shone a light on their secretive activities to […]
UUA Targeted by ALEC
As those who attended the 2014 GA heard from our Treasurer, Tim Brennan, two of our advocacy successes of the last year were persuading Visa, Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline to cease funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is a conservative lobbying group that routinely seeks to obstruct or reverse progress on environmental and social issues: for […]
November Monthly Commentary
After a spike in volatility in October and a subsequent recovery, it was back to more of the same for US markets in November as many domestic equity indices scaled new highs. Conversely, 10-year government bond yields in many countries—Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Japan— dropped to all-time lows late in the month as […]