Northwest Coalitionfor Responsible Investment Annual Report 2017

NORTHWEST COALITION FOR RESPONSIBLE INVESTMENT

A program of the Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center

Annual Report 2017

His Living Legacy: We Will Be Better And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us. They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed. —Maya Angelou This summer we experienced the passing of a great soul, Capuchin Franciscan Father Michael Crosby. Those of us who knew Michael marveled at how this man whose energy and passion for justice were boundless for almost fifty years could peacefully accept his cancer diagnosis and comfort us as he waited for Sister Death. Upon reflection we realized that we shouldn’t be surprised as all his work—including 19 books on church reform and biblical discipleship and his call for oil, tobacco, food and retail corporations to be socially and environmentally responsible—was never about Michael, it was about the “kindom.” Upon learning of Michael’s passing, the sustainability officer of one of the tobacco giants he had engaged over many years wrote to the Seventh Generation Coalition for Responsible Investment noting that Michael’s “unique ability to listen and confront different perspectives while never losing sight of the causes he wanted to advance” had led the company to improve. He never lost his compassion for the tobacco farmers that was ignited in him as he witnessed their struggles firsthand in Nicaragua in 1980.

The officer went on to recount a visit they had made to African countries where they talked with farmers to understand their plight and what the company was doing to improve labor practices. He said he heard Michael say many times, “We are all God’s children,” and his words and actions reflected this. In its twenty-third year, the Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment (NWCRI), is proud to claim our place in Michael Crosby’s legacy of faith-based shareholder advocacy. The Intercommunity Peace and Justice Center was only two years old when we invited him to our 1993 Socially Responsible Investment Conference to launch our CRI. As one of the first members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) he had created a way for smaller religious communities around the country to form coalitions and become members of ICCR. This year NWCRI members, in collaboration with our colleagues at ICCR, brought 15 social and environmental justice issues to the boardrooms of 52 corporations, filed 38 shareholder resolutions and participated in over 45 dialogues. At the annual TED2017 Conference in Vancouver, BC earlier this year, Pope Francis spoke to all those afraid of the future when he said, “Many of us, nowadays, seem to believe that a happy future is something impossible to achieve.” He continued, “The future does have a name, and its name is hope. A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another ‘you,’ and another ‘you,’ and it turns into an ‘us.’” As we grieve Michael’s passing we celebrate this single individual whose life-long work was building the “kindom,” an ‘us.’ In the words of Maya Angelou, “[He] existed. [He] existed. We can be. Be and be better. For [He] existed.”