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Congratulations! by Stephen Moody, Senior Portfolio Manager From the Summer 2010 issue of ValuesIt gives us great pleasure to report that our own Tim Smith was recently the recipient of two awards paying tribute to his decades-long contribution to greater corporate social responsibility through shareholder engagement. In March Tim received an Award for Building Partnership’s for South Africa’s Equitable Development from Shared Interest, a nongovernmental organization that guarantees bank loans to mobilize resources for economic development in low-income communities in South Africa. In May Tim was the recipient of the third annual Joan Bavaria Awards for Building Sustainability in the Capital Markets, awarded by Ceres and Trillium Asset Management to honor the memory of their founder, Joan Bavaria, who was a pioneer of social investing.
For over forty years Tim has promoted increased corporate social responsibility, beginning with the South Africa anti-apartheid campaign. This campaign, which culminated in successfully persuading banks worldwide to deny capital to South Africa, helped persuade the South African Nationalist Party and President F. W. De Klerk to change political course, release Nelson Mandela, and begin to dismantle apartheid. A turning point in that effort was the successful persuasion of Chase Manhattan Bank to be the first bank to cease lending to the apartheid regime.
In the 1970s, Tim was unique among advocates at that time because of his direct shareholder engagement with corporate management. In his role as executive director of the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which became the de facto clearinghouse for shareholder activism of all kinds, Tim engaged with corporate management on a broad spectrum of issues. Along with religious investors, Tim never gave up on the possibility that corporate management could be persuaded to do the right thing. To that end, among his greatest accomplishments has been building collaboration for constructive corporate social change among a broad network of socially concerned shareholders: states, municipalities and their pension funds; investment management firms; labor unions; foundations and other endowments; other non-governmental organizations; and, of course, the many religious organizations with which he originally worked.
In the past decade we have been extremely fortunate that Tim has made
Walden Asset Management his home away from home. He has continued to work selflessly on the issues of our time, including executive compensation, corporate lobbying, greater corporate accountability and transparency, environmental protection, and workplace conditions. In particular, Tim has co-led a coalition of investors, corporate governance experts and companies supporting “Say on Pay” urging the adoption of the reform as “best practice” corporate governance.
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