PAB
Celebrates Three Decades (This is the first in a series of three articles highlighting the work of the Portfolio Advisory Board in recognition of its 30th anniversary in 2005.) The 1968 Chapter of Renewal was a defining event for the Adrian Dominican Sisters. Like other religious congregations at the time, the Adrian Dominicans were faced with new challenges in an ever-changing world, a world that was beginning to focus more and more on social justice. Indeed, the turbulent decade of the Sixties, coupled with the Chapter of Renewal, challenged the Congregation to live the Gospel in the modern world, and to seek new ways of serving the poor and marginalized.
“The ferments of the late 1960s — student unrest, opposition to the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle, new ideas from Vatican Council II, renewal in religious life, liberation theologies, feminism, critiques of United States foreign policy, antimilitarism — led to disturbing questions about the uses of power in all institutional settings,” Carol Coston, OP, wrote in “Women Religious Invest in Their Values,” a chapter from the book Journey in Faith and Fidelity: Women Shaping Religious Life for a Renewed Church. “As women religious, we lived in the midst of these societal ferments, as well as those we spawned ourselves in the renewal process. As Adrian Dominicans, imbued with a new sense of our responsibility for social justice, we found ourselves continually questioning how best to use our institutional resources — both human and financial — in furthering our mission, the mission of the gospel.” The Congregation wanted to begin investing in companies that didn’t use, misuse or abuse the poor, as well as invest in “people” projects. In 1973, the Congregation delved into the area of corporate responsibility when Louise Borgacz, OP, was asked by the General Council to investigate the role of the church as investor. Through her attendance at various meetings and symposiums throughout the country on religious investments and corporate responsibility, Sister Louise discovered that socially responsible investing was a new endeavor not only for the Adrian Dominicans, but for the Catholic Church as a whole. Sister Louise suggested that a formal approach to socially responsible investing be formed. As a result, Goal IV of General Chapter 1974 resulted in the creation of a Portfolio Advisory Board (PAB) to “evaluate our Congregational investments in relation to the Gospel social principles and identify means to effect change toward justice in the policies and operations of corporations in which we hold stock.” Adrian Dominican Sisters Margaret Andrezik, Louise Borgacz, Carol Coston, Anne Guinan, Marie Solanus Reilly and Kathleen Woods were the first PAB members.
The first group with whom PAB collaborated — and still does — was the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), an association of 275 faith-based institutional investors. ICCR and its members press companies to be socially and environmentally responsible through dialogue meetings and shareholder resolutions. In collaboration with ICCR, PAB monitors the Congregation’s corporate investments and by a variety of corporate responsibility activities, strives to reverse situations of injustice and advocates for peace, justice and the integrity of creation. An early and major PAB corporate responsibility action was initiated with Gulf and Western in the Dominican Republic in the late 1970s. Gulf and Western was involved in sugar production in the DR, but because working conditions, wages and living quarters were so abominable, few Dominicans worked as cane cutters. The company purchased illegal Haitians to do the work, not only because they could be exploited, but also because they were unorganized. As a result of PAB’s dialogue at shareholder meetings and with corporate officials, working conditions for the cane cutters improved slightly. Gulf and Western, however, eventually sold its sugar plant in the DR when the executive leadership changed.
Four years after the Congregation endorsed PAB’s establishment, the 1978 General Chapter expanded the board’s mission by mandating that an Alternative Investment Fund be created to provide low-interest loans to nonprofit, community-based organizations that addressed the needs of the economically poor. That same year, the Congregation made its first investments in Chicago’s South Shore Bank; a credit union in Texas; an ecumenical coalition in Ohio addressing unemployment; and St. Mary’s Development Center in South Carolina. The investments — which were loans, not grants — totaled $240,000. Since then, PAB has made 280 community investments totaling $11 million, which help low-income people to become self-determining and to improve their communities. During its 30 years in existence, PAB has worked tirelessly to invest in the Congregation’s values, and to bring about social and corporate change. |
