Trying to follow

As Summer quickly approaches it’s time for Corporate Responsibility Mondays to come to a close. It’s been a fun series as Josh and I have co-blogged about corporations in similar industries with differing records:

1. Clothing:
   Bad: L.L. Bean
2. Technology:
   Good: Dell and Green hosting
   Evil: Apple
3. Clothing:
   Good: Maggie’s Organics
   Bad: Kohls
4. Sweets:
   Good: Equal Exchange
   Bad: Sara Lee
5. Shoes:
   Good: Tom’s, Hersey, No Sweat, Adbusters, etc.
   Bad: Nike
6. Bananas:
   Good: Fair Trade
   Bad: Chiquita
7. Clothing:
   Good: No Sweat Apparel
   Bad: J. Crew
8. Fast Food:
   Good: Chipotle
   Evil: Burger King
9. Stocks and Investing:
   Good: Socially Responsible Investing (SRI)
   Bad: Fidelity (and Playboy)

This week, as the Corporate Responsibility draws to a close, Josh and I will be talking about investing. Josh is highlighting a invest firm/stock you might want to stay away from. I’m going to take a different approach today and simply introduce you to the area, not a specific company, of Socially Responsible Investing.

Socially Responsible Investing (which I’ll call SRI from now on) is a fairly simple and straight forward concept, which is simply to have a goal of investing responsibly. What this entails will vary person to person and company to company so it’s something that takes a bit of research.
SRI has taken some criticism because the term doesn’t have clear standards with it or criteria by which to understand what is “responsible” and what is not. Critics say that anyone can simply write up a righteous sounding mission statement and label themselves SRI there by drawing customers and not really being required to perform at the same level of other Mutual Funds and stocks. In an industry that’s fundamental existence has to do with the bottom line, any one suggesting ethics or responsibility come first will be expected to be challenged and looked at funny. The critics do have a point. There are companies out there that have simply taken the label of SRI, but are neither being ‘responsible’ nor seriously ‘investing.’ Yet, that shouldn’t cause use to ditch the whole industry and invest without regard to our values.
If you have any intention of investing your money in the stock market during your life, whether for retirement, college, or just long-term investing, it’s important that your values are reflected in what your choosing. Some SRI stocks focus on environmentally green companies, others seek to avoid tobacco and alcohol, others actively avoid military and gun companies. SRI involves to components usually, screening and activism. Screening is like a mentioned above, filtering companies and stocks based on certain value criteria. They would decide what makes up their portfolio based on avoiding certain companies and seeking out other ones. Activism is the idea of using your investment and stake as a shareholder to encourage change in companies. So, an SRI Mutual Fund might invest in Apple computers so that they can advocate at the annual shareholders meeting for Apple to research more environmentally friendly ways of producing and recycling their products.
The hardest part of SRI is actually doing it. I’ve researched the field off and on for about a year. When I had the chance to set-up a pension with my work I didn’t have much of a choice, there was only one SRI to choose from, Calvert. I’ve been happy with Calvert so far, but I plan on doing more research this summer and seeing what I come up with. Hopefully after this brief lesson your interested in researching Socially Responsible Investing too. That’s why I’ve dubbed this the CRM Summer Project. Maybe this post can be come the conversation hub for our research on SRI and what conclusions we come to on were you should invest. Here are some links to get you started:

• Social Funds
• Social Investment Forum
• SRI From Wikipedia
• Mutual Fund Social Screen Tool

Full Disclosure: I currently have some Mutual Funds that are not in SRI funds. I had them before I discovered this important concept and had a desire to align all of my life with my values. I plan on moving them, but didn’t want to make any snap decisions, but rather move them once I understand what’s best.

Corporate Responsibility Mondays have been a ton of fun and I hope you’ve found them interesting and useful. I’ll continue to try and highlight important companies as I discover them, but for now it’s time to say goodbye to the weekly co-blogging with Josh and open Mondays once again.

Be sure to check out Josh’s final post on a stock to avoid.

I decided if there was one word to describe the event I attend last night it was: Cool. I mean cool in the trendy sort of way too, but I realized maybe that’s okay, at least for now. I drove out with some house mates to a field in Hendersonville, TN to participate in an event called Displace Me, put on by Invisible Children.
Here is a summary of the event: 500 people showed up at a field (60,000+ total in 15 cities across the USA), we bring cardboard to make a home with, a box of crackers and a water bottle. Throughout the night we hear video testimonies of people from the camps and we ourselves build homes to sleep in for the night, get our food from ration stations and write letters to political leaders asking them to respond to the situation in Uganda. A video was also shot to be shown on the Senate floor this week to encourage them to action. It was a protest of sorts, a stand of solidarity and a trendy event (this last part made me uncomfortable).
The folks at Invisible Children are doing good things. They are marketing an end to a war in a way that has never been done. It’s catch and cool and it makes you want to be involved, and the end results are that people are fed, educated, and violence is ended; that’s a beautiful thing. I wonder though, how long our attention spans will be, and how serious we are about fixing the problems and willing to change our lives to do so. The event I went to was full of college kids, fired up about making a difference, may that passion carry them through adulthood and the rest of their lives.

I have hope that some will, but cynicism that it will be too few to even notice. I wonder if all our fanfare is really just for us, because it’s more fresh then boy bands and football games. There’s a tension in me. I went to the event to support others in their statements, rather then give way to my cynical attitude, but I still wonder whose right. I feel a tension between joining the folks at Invisible Children, and joining the folks at Geez Magazine:

At that point in history doing good rose dramatically in popularity. It was cool to care. Hollywood strode awkwardly off the red carpet into a one-US-dollar-a-day village. Rock ‘n roll walked streets that had no names. Smart stars drove smart cars. It was a good era for smooth-talking doomsday sayers and drop-dead gorgeous do-gooders.

Benevolence became a brand. It was marketable. It sold. It increased one’s cultural stock value. It went well with sunglasses by . . . whoever made the hot shit sunglasses in those days. It flowed seamlessly into the show script of Entertainment Tonight. You weren’t a star if you didn’t have a cause. It was a new era.

Philanthropy practically became a sport. Gates dropped $30 billion on good causes, and Warren Buffet put in $31 billion. The big boys bought race horses, or football teams and set up charitable foundations. Goodwill was in the air.

Every corporation on earth adopted sustainable development practices – triple/quadruple/quintuple bottom lines. They all won green awards from each other’s foundations and associations, and added “environmental responsibility” sections to their websites. Click.

Both hope and cynicism could hardly have wished for ground more fertile. But neither seemed like satisfying responses. Eventually, weary of salvation, Africa said no thanks.

And we started looking for a less popular way to care.

Another post from a series I did on Considering Church, this one was entitled, Good Sermons Draw a Crowd:

I understand bigger churches, especially when there is a great preacher. There are a handful of sermons I download regularly to listen to during the week, and if I lived in those towns I’d probably check them out on Sunday. There is a church in my hometown that has grown immensly, and I think it is largely do to the head pastors wonderful preaching. So, don’t get me wrong I understand the appeal of a good sermon.

For me though, that just doesn’t seem what the church should centrally be about. One of the first things that is said about the early meetings of believers is “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” Now, I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have teaching, I just think we’ve put far too much focus on it, and we lack the fellowship and the close knit community that is so necessary, or beneficial, to carrying out the teachings and the gospel itself.

I’ve continued this discussion recently off-line with some friends in my community and with my brother and dad on our camping trip. It’s been extremely interesting to think about. And at the same time, I’ve been listening to multiple sermons a week on my bike ride to and from work. I’m not against sermons, just sermons as the focus of a Sunday morning.

What are your thoughts on Sermons on Sunday?

I’m adding some features to my site. This one is called a mini post

Spurred on by the discussion about Driving and Environmental Stewardship, I thought I’d imagine what would happen if everyone just stopped driving. They’d need some sort of compelling reason, so to make this semi realistic, let’s say that during the Super Bowl when millions of people are watching TV, there is a commercial that shows conclusive evidence that driving cars kills babies (It’s got to be drastic right?). What would happen?

Monday Morning:
Millions call in sick to work, simply because they don’t know how to get there without their vehicle. Those with the 1+ hour commute start looking for other jobs closer to home. Lot’s of other people would take public transportation for the first time. They’d probably get up earlier, walk a few blocks with cash in their pocket to pay the fare and get a transfer slip. The only problem is the bus would probably be late since their ridership has increased 1000% overnight! Lot’s of people would be late to work and to school, but the bosses and teachers would be accommodating as they are making big transportation changes as well. Some in decent climates pull out their bikes and try their commute for the first time on two wheels. Every once in a while you see a car driving down the street, but the looks and scowls they get are frequent. When they arrive to work their bosses call them in and reprimand them for being unethical and not putting forth a positive image of their business, and they threaten to fire them if they don’t find an appropriate way to get to work. To initially accommodate, most businesses shorten their work week by one hour in the morning and night to allow employees time to adjust to their new commutes (which might not be necessary since nobodies really dealing with rush hour traffic anymore).

In One Week:
Cities would respond immediately. Bus routes, buses and bus driver jobs would double or triple, the only delay being how quickly they could get new buses in service. Businesses would make showers available, maybe even create locker rooms for people to use after biking in to their jobs. Tons of entrepreneurs would start-up private buses to fill the gap between public bus services. And in the meanwhile, restaurants and other nightlife experience a serious decline as their only costumers are those within walking distance. The same is true for grocery stores and other shopping centers. The mass of shoppers that filled those stores weeknights and weekends is no longer there, and won’t be; a change needs to be made.

A Few Months:
We are a resilient people and we are still a capitalist society, so the response to this change is fascinating. Large Shopping areas off the highway are like ghost towns. The people that used to work there have changed jobs to similar positions in local business in their own neighborhood. Those of an entrepreneurial spirit have started up coffee shops, grocery stores, hardware shops, barbers, and convenience stores within walking distance of every neighborhood in the country. The stock market declines dramatically as businesses like Walmart, Exxon and GM experience a decline or even absence of sales, but the economy is still booming. Money is circulating on a much more local level now. Instead of a person driving into a shopping center to profit a company from a different state and pay a minimum wage to a person from a different community, the money stays in the neighborhood. A person gets a haircut at the barber who buys his groceries from his neighbors local store who gets a toolset from the local hardware store who tithes to the local church who pays for a homeless women to get an apartment from a local landlord who visits the local barber who just employed the formerly homeless women who just got a job there, and the cycle continues.
And a lot of people move.

It would take less then a year for our entire country to dramatically change. My thoughts are just guesses at some of the changes that might happen if this happened. A mass exodus from the use of personal transportation, because, maybe somewhat indirectly, our gas-guzzling, air-polluting, crash-prone cars really do kill babies.