The Episcopal Church was a pioneer in the socially responsible investment movement.
In 1971, The New York Times reported on its front page that the church was going to offer a shareholder resolution calling for General Motors to cease manufacturing in South Africa because of apartheid.
The Securities & Exchange Commission historically did not allow nonfinancial resolutions on corporate proxy statements. But Paul Neuhauser, a law professor from Iowa and an active Episcopalian, used an SEC administrative process to argue that the resolution should be included, and “we won,” he said.
Neuhauser, now 90, remained active on what is now the church’s Committee for Corporate Social Responsibility (CCSR) for more than half a century. On June 24, Presiding Bishop Michael B. Curry and others honored him at the 81st General Convention in Louisville, Kentucky, at a luncheon attended by about 100 bishops, deputies, and others.
“I want to tell you how grateful I am to be in the long lineage of presiding bishops who have served with you,” Curry told Neuhauser.
Neuhauser was happy to reminisce with TLC about his role in the early days of the movement, but he insisted that the main person who deserved credit was Presiding Bishop John Hines, who led the church from 1965 to 1974.
“I’ve always thought I should lead a crusade to have him included in the the calendar of saints,” Neuhauser said. “He moved the church from stodgy and backward-looking to forward-looking,” and traveled to Detroit to advocate for the anti-apartheid proposal at the General Motors shareholder meeting.
“Our [proxy] vote wasn’t successful, we got 2 percent, but it got the ball rolling,” Neuhauser said at the luncheon. In 1986, General Motors sold its operations in South Africa and left the country.
Directly or indirectly, the church controls more than [$20 billion] in investments, including $15 billion at the Church Pension Fund. CCSR leverages those investments to advocate for causes and values determined by the General Convention.
The committee maintains a no-buy list of companies in five broad areas: companies that benefit from human rights abuses; tobacco companies; for-profit prison operators; and companies that derive more than a specified percentage of their revenues from fossil fuels or military contracts.
But “the no-buy list is not the key to the activities,” Neuhauser told TLC. “The active stuff is the shareholder proposals and the voting.” Every year the committee initiates “engagements” with dozens of corporations on issues including the environment, human trafficking, gun violence, opioid addiction, diversity on corporate boards, and more.
There’s a wealth of information about CCSR’s activities online, but only if you know where to look.
You can’t find it by searching the Blue Book reports, because there’s no search function. You can’t find it by searching the entire General Convention site — still no search function.
If you go to the Interim Bodies submenu under Governance, you can search for social — and find a link to the roster of committee members. But to read the CCSR Blue Book report, you have to know that CCSR is a creature of Executive Council. Then you can open the 161-page Executive Council Blue Book report, and deep within you’ll find the 65-page CCSR report (scroll down to page 71 for CCSR’s section).
The CCSR Blue Book report describes the committee’s function, history, and screening criteria, along with a brief description of the committee’s interaction with each of the dozens of companies in which it has taken an active role.
There’s also a well-produced 30-minute video, The CCSR Story, on the church’s main website, in which Neuhauser and a dozen other narrators trace the history of the Episcopal Church’s corporate social responsibility. Excerpts from the video were shown at the luncheon.
