Overall Rating Gold - expired
Overall Score 74.18
Liaison Allie Schwartz
Submission Date Nov. 30, 2012
Executive Letter Download

STARS v1.1

Columbia University
PAE-17: Shareholder Advocacy

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 5.00 / 5.00 Ursula Bollini
Senior Manager Finance Initiatives & SRI
Finance

Criteria

There are two possible approaches to earning this credit.  

1)      Institution filed or co-filed one or more shareholder resolutions that address sustainability or submitted one or more letters about social or environmental responsibility to a company in which it holds investments, during the previous three years.  

and/or

2)      Institution has conducted a negative screening of its entire investment pool within the last three years.  This could take the form of prohibiting investment in an industry (e.g. tobacco or weapons manufacturing) or participating in a divestment effort (e.g. companies operating in South Africa during apartheid).  The negative screen includes selling all but $2,000 or less of the affected direct holdings and writing a letter to all fund managers encouraging them to remove affected holdings as well.

Institutions for which investments are handled by the university system and/or a separate foundation of the institution should report on the shareholder advocacy activities of those entities. 


Applicability

This credit applies to institutions with endowments of US $1 million or larger.  Institutions with endowments less than US $1 million may choose to omit this credit.


Scoring

Institutions earn 5 points for meeting the criteria outlined above.  Partial points are not available for this credit. 


Measurement

Timeframe

Report on actions taken within the past three years.

Sampling and Data Standards

Not applicable

The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.