In early 2008, nearly a dozen Trillium clients asked us to develop a new investment approach – one that seeks companies providing solutions to growing global sustainability challenges.  Evolving from “do no harm,” their mantra became “invest in the innovators,” supporting only those companies actively creating positive change through their core business.  Heading their call, [...]

In August, we bade farewell to the 2010–2011 “proxy season,” the inside lingo for the annual cycle of filing resolutions, negotiating their withdrawal, and getting out the vote for the remainder that will appear on the spring proxy ballots.
“A good portion of our dialogues and resolutions resulted in agreements with companies to improve policies and [...]

Susan Baker
Good news came out of the United Nations this summer that has positive implications for shareholder advocates and activists working to promote and protect human rights.  The UN Human Rights Council (formerly the UN Commission on Human Rights) endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations ‘Protect, Respect and [...]

Natasha Lamb
As communities around the globe strive to meet ever-increasing energy demand and produce sustainable jobs and investments, we are at a crossroads where we must either aggressively adopt non-fossil fuel energy sources or risk exceeding the 2°C temperature rise already expected from the cumulative buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Mainstream conventional wisdom [...]

Cheryl Smith, Ph.D., CFA
As we watched the awesome power and devastation of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, our attention bounced between concern for the more than 18,000 people either dead or missing, horrified fascination with the evolving control issues at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, and concern about the eventual impact on the Japanese [...]

If there’s a theme tying together our shareholder engagements this year, it’s aptly summarized in a New Yorker cartoon showing a corporate executive reminding his colleagues at the conference room table, “Let’s never forget that the public’s desire for transparency has to be balanced by our need for concealment.”
Come to think of it, that’s every [...]

Society adopts innovative technologies by a process that business schools describe with an “S-curve,” as on the graph below. The vertical axis represents the rising percentage of society using the technology while the horizontal axis represents time.

In the first stage early adopters represent a small, slowly rising percentage of society. At a certain point, however, [...]

Susan Baker
Its wealth is unearthed by the poor, controlled by the strong, then sold to a world largely oblivious to its origin. So reads the “African natural resource curse” – a paradox of plenty.
In few African nations has this curse brought greater conflict and environmental damage than in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). When [...]

F. Farnum Brown, Ph.D.
Much of what’s confounding about our wayward financial markets today can be explained, I think, by reference to the chart below. It plots the price level of the S&P 500 from the early 1960s through today.

If you look at the red, upward-sloping line on the chart you’ll see that from late 1974 [...]

Jonas Kron
“The Court’s blinkered and aphoristic approach to the First Amendment may well promote corporate power at the cost of the individual and collective self-expression the Amendment was meant to serve.”
~Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the minority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission1
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Citizens United v. [...]