A friend makes a living working for an investment group that claims to invest in socially responsible securities; I couldn’t resist telling him that I played a critical role in starting the movement that is supporting him now.
As a board member of Point Foundation (created with Whole Earth Catalog money) in 1971, I convened and paid for all the corporate social responsibility activists in the country to come to a gathering and planning session in Inverness CA. There were over 30 people for a long weekend. (Several got their start with Ralph Nader organizations.) A key figure was Alice Tepper Marlin who published the main guide that evaluated corporations on their social responsibility.
That gathering, like a few others in history, was seminal in the creation of the movement. It was a chance for all the important figures in the field to get to know each other and find ways to work together.
I also traveled to New York, as treasurer of the Glide Foundation (Glide Memorial United Methodist Church) as the first portfolio manager concerned with corporate social responsibility to talk to major foundation executives about using some of their investment portfolios to support their institutional programs. Many came close to laughing at me while I was still in their office.
I funded several of the leading Corporate Social Responsibility organizations and kept my finger on the pulse of the movement for several decades.
I also put sizable chunks of money in the first two funds in the field, Pax World Fund and Calvert Investment. Both still exist.
The field of socially responsible investing ran into a problem. The definition of social responsibility went wild. Initially the concerns were gender and racial diversity as well as environmental responsibility. Within a few years corporations were being judged on production of war materiel, connections to the tobacco industry, then investment and connection to South Africa and the Philippines (remember Marcos). From there on the list got longer: animal testing, renewable energy, renewable resources, labeling of products, fire safety of children’s clothes, charitable giving, toxic product disposal and then overseas sweat shops.
Since no organization or group of organizations could keep track of actual corporate behavior in this wide range of issues, everyone just started faking it. Today it is just a feel good message. “We are warm and fuzzy socially responsible investors”, mostly putting their money in government bonds, a few internet companies, alternate energy companies and affordable housing REITs.
I will confess. Within two years of helping start the movement, I decided that corporations were not moral organizations and shouldn't be. Just creating jobs and serving their customers was sufficient reason to support them. Commerce and corporations had taken the world out of starvation, physical human misery and created global vitality. Commerce was already better than anything else known to man; we shouldn’t diddle with it.