Provide Input at Upcoming Knowledge Lab Roundtables Join us for our next virtual System-Level Investing Knowledge Lab Roundtables to move from listening to action following the conclusion of our Knowledge Lab Listening Tour. We’ll dig into three foundational areas of...

Last month we wrapped the Listening Tour for the System-Level Investing Knowledge Lab: a public-good platform designed to curate, create, and convene in support of the theory and practice of system-level investing. Through in-person and virtual roundtables, one-on-one...

Looking Back on Four Years of Portfolios on the Ballot Before Portfolios on the Ballot launched in 2023, TSC aimed to show investors who use a company-specific focus that portfolio-wide risk is embedded throughout the economy and that those risks are actionable in...

Last month, Rick Alexander, founder of The Shareholder Commons (TSC), announced that he will step down as CEO and introduced Dan Osusky as the next CEO of the organization. You can learn more about Dan and his background here. As Rick noted in his message, this next...

Dear Colleagues, I will be stepping down as CEO of The Shareholder Commons, effective June 30, 2026. I am sure the timing will be a surprise to many of our allies, as it does feel as if the ideas we have been promoting are gaining traction at an increasing rate--why...

The ESG Backlash Can’t Keep Its Story Straight: What the Vanguard Settlement Reveals Frederick Alexander The movement to discredit ESG investing claims to protect investors and consumers but really operates to shield corporate executives from their shareholders—part...

When Policy Fails, Investors Must Step Up For years, there has been a debate among those working to fight climate change: does time spent on investor stewardship pressing companies to limit their greenhouse gas emissions distract from the essential work of changing...

Building a New Culture In our last newsletter of 2025, we noted that system stewardship was maturing and that body of relevant work was expanding accordingly. One of the most encouraging signs of this maturation is that new publications about system stewardship are...

As the year-end approaches, we are reflecting with gratitude on a period marked by extraordinary progress in system stewardship. Throughout the year, investors, researchers, and others have stepped forward to acknowledge that safeguarding long-term portfolio returns...

Recently, TSC’s CEO Rick Alexander had the opportunity to speak at the Intentional Endowments Network's 2025 Annual Forum. His remarks are reprinted here: Good morning. Thanks for that nice introduction and to everyone at IEN for putting this forum together. Instead...

In September, The Shareholder Commons announced plans to embark on a new collaborative project to produce a system stewardship framework. With a thriving ecosystem of investors and other organizations taking action on system stewardship and growing interest from...

Our May newsletter – System Stewardship in Bloom – highlighted how investors and others are embracing portfolio-wide responsibility: recognizing that undiversifiable risks threaten entire portfolios, and that long-term returns depend on the health of the economic,...

As shareholder activity heats up across the Southern Hemisphere, Portfolios on the Ballot (POTB) has re-launched with a fresh website and a new series of POTB digest emails to spotlight systems-first proposals going to a vote through the end of 2025. From boardrooms...

August marked our sixth anniversary at The Shareholder Commons, and we have been taking a hard look at where we have been, and where we want to go over the next phase of our organization’s work. In 2020, the notion that diversified investors need to focus on the...

Readers of this newsletter know we believe investors should encourage companies to eschew practices that damage critical systems. This is just common sense: most investors are diversified, so that the value of their portfolios rises and falls with the health of the...

Shareholder Voting Must Account for Systemic Risk The most recent ECGI Blog featured a post from TSC CEO Rick Alexander arguing that investor decisions must evolve to account for systemic risks like climate change, inequality, and the erosion of democratic norms....

In its latest report, the Business Roundtable (“BRT”)—the CEOs of the largest companies in the United States—makes a sweeping claim: that the proxy system is broken, harming investors by discouraging companies from going public. But a closer look reveals a more...

The Shareholder Commons has launched its latest proxy voting guide, Portfolios on the Ballot 2025, which flags proxy campaigns that include a diversified investor perspective, promoting guardrails that can protect the social and environmental foundations supporting...

An anti-shareholder movement—often mislabeled as “anti-ESG”—is silencing everyday investors’ voices in the United States, including the 50% of private sector workers who participate in 401(k) retirement plans. Government Capture Anti-shareholder activists use...

Happy new year! As we embark on another solar orbit, the world around us may feel tumultuous. With the largest economy poised to enter a deregulatory period, investors’ duty to their clients and beneficiaries has not changed. In our September newsletter, we described...

Oxfam and Rights CoLab released The Investor Case for Fighting Inequality: How Inequality Harms Investors and What Investors Should Do About It. Focused on the sources and outcomes of socioeconomic inequality, this paper serves to alert investors to the growing body...

Investors’ portfolios are at risk from a warming planet, a challenged social fabric, and many other threats. COVID-19 and the 2008 financial crisis gave us a glimpse of the interdependent nature of our global economy, while the science around matters such as climate...

Modern finance has provided investors with an understanding of risk and return that essentially mandates ownership of stock in hundreds or even thousands of companies, allowing them to earn the high returns of risky equity while limiting the risks that come with...

“The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the [new U.S. Supreme Court decisions] have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.” ~Justice Jackson, dissenting in Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors, FRS   Many...

Exxon Sues its Shareholders Earlier this year, ExxonMobil (XOM) sued two shareholders that had filed a climate-related proposal for the 2024 annual shareholders’ meeting. Instead of following the straightforward SEC process companies typically use to omit a proposal...

Readers of this space know The Shareholder Commons was involved in a lawsuit against Meta Platforms (the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and other internet services). At the end of April, that litigation came to an end when the Delaware Chancery Court dismissed the...

Our guardrails are in full swing, and investors are increasingly seeing them as tools to protect their portfolios. Investor-mediated guardrails define company operational parameters that safeguard diversified portfolio value, discouraging corporate behavior that...

Our 2024 proxy voting guide is the first publication specifically designed to help investors vote their proxies on a systems-first basis. HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE REPORT We have collected nearly 60 shareholder initiatives that integrate arguments in the proposal or...

As seasoned readers of this newsletter may recall, we’re supporting a lawsuit against Meta Platforms. The case claims Meta’s directors must consider the company’s impact on the economically important systems that support its shareholders’ diversified portfolios. In a...

Poverty wages don’t just undermine workers: inequality perpetuated by low pay at companies such as Walgreens Boots Alliance (NYSE: WBA) threatens the national and global economies with losses that will burden investment portfolios for years to come. Closing the living...

Living Wage & the Engagement Gap Today we publish our new research, “Living Wage and the Engagement Gap,” on the systemic risk of low wages and income inequality to diversified portfolio value, which depends on critical social and environmental systems. Among...

Regular readers know our chief complaint about the investing world: too much emphasis on the individual financial performance of portfolio companies, and too little on how those companies affect the systems that underpin investors’ entire portfolios. When push comes...

We have provided our responses to the ISS 2023 Policy Survey. Our responses are largely based on the observation that the ISS benchmark voting guidelines are not designed to serve the average institutional investor, who holds a diversified portfolio or is managing...

The global economy faces a US$100 trillion headwind over the next three decades from overuse of antimicrobials. TSC is working with institutional investors to implement a Guardrail campaign focused on overuse and abuse of antimicrobials in meat supply chains. The...

Shareholders who want portfolio companies to improve their impact on society or the environment are hampered by their reliance on arguments that such changes will improve company value. Such arguments lack credibility when the requested changes are the very same...

Portfolios on the Ballot   Proxy season allows shareholders to tell companies how they want their capital applied in the real economy. Among other matters, shareholders can press for an end to extractive practices that threaten diversified investors’ financial...

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud On December 16, Meta made a little-noticed filing in response to a shareholder’s lawsuit against the Company and its directors. While the filing has remained largely under the radar, it speaks volumes about the reality of the...

We’ve filed shareholder proposals at Hormel Foods (annual meeting date January 31), Tyson Foods (February 9), and McDonald’s (TBD) asking those companies to comply with World Health Organization (“WHO”) Guidelines on Use of Medically Important Antimicrobials in...