Through Social Choice for Social Change, Wollman escalated the public pressure for a proactive, positive investment strategy for the Social Choice Account. He recruited new supporters and won institutional support from groups such as the Union of Radical Political Economists, the National Women’s Studies Association, and Psychologists for Social Responsibility. In the late 1990s, he collected pledges of financial support for the Social Choice Account if it incorporated community investing in its portfolio. Ultimately, about 700 individuals pledged to invest $17 million in the account if TIAA-CREF pursued community investments.
Around 2000, Wollman grew interested in working with various campaigns that were criticizing specific corporations for their labor, environmental, and social policies. He started a new coalition, Make TIAA-CREF Ethical, with a variety of other groups campaigning for major pension funds and investors either to divest from or to directly influence big, miscreant corporations, such as Philip Morris/Altria (promoting smoking), Nike and Wal-Mart (sourcing from sweatshops), Chevron (benefiting from slave labor in Burma), Costco (destructively siting stores in Mexico), and Coca-Cola (linked to paramilitary killings of labor leaders in Colombia). Coalition members include groups such as the U.S. Campaign For Burma, Corporate Accountability International, Press for Change, Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, Sprawl-Busters, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
TIAA-CREF rejected demands to influence these companies, arguing that its practices followed well-respected social screens. “As a provider of pensions to over 2.8 million participants, we cannot use participant assets to debate the activities of one company over another,” TIAA-CREF representative Dan Lindner wrote to the coalition in 2005, ruling out divestiture. “The Social Choice Account is managed in strict adherence to the Broad Market Social Index (BMSI), the most far-reaching socially screened index today.”
Wollman recruited support from well-known progressive academics, such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Dennis Brutus, but the number of investors actively involved in the continued protests was small. Eventually he won additional support from teacher organizations, such as the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, which in 2007 persuaded the 600,000-member New York State United Teachers coalition to support greater TIAA-CREF shareholder activism in support of labor rights.
Despite securing various supporters and partners over the years, Wollman ultimately has done much of the work on his own with little financial help. He cut back on his teaching and his salary at Manchester to devote more time to his organizing.
In 2007, Wollman shifted his academic base to Bentley College, in Waltham, Mass., though he still lives in Indiana. Often he works through quiet dialogue with TIAA-CREF officials, and in 2004 even ended his lobbying efforts after TIAA-CREF assured him that his proposals for more proactive, community investments were “doable” and would soon be implemented. “We have met our part of the ‘bargain’ by refraining from more assertive tactics,” he wrote to TIAA-CREF a year later, “but we have very little to show for it.”
Social Choice for Social Change revived its pressure for community investment in 2005, but internal momentum for change was also building at TIAA-CREF as the company increased its staff responsible for socially responsible investing. And a 2006 survey of TIAA-CREF investors found that 83 percent of Social Change Account investors — and even 67 percent of General Account investors — strongly or somewhat agreed that “ensuring that my investment decisions reflect my personal values about social and environmental impacts” is most important in making investment decisions.
Clearly there was wide support for socially responsible investing. More investors and fund managers are beginning to understand that social dividends do not have to come at the expense of financial returns. “We are the only institutional investor that has done a survey of our investor base,” says O’Brien, which “helped inform our strategy for expansion [and] demonstrated broad interest in a strategy for the double bottom line,” both financial and social returns.
By 2007, TIAA-CREF had made significant steps toward more socially responsible investing, in both its Social Choice Account and General Account. It had established a Social and Community Investing Department, expanded its Corporate Social Real Estate program, which includes affordable-housing investment, launched a Community Bank Deposit Program with a $22-million purchase of a certificate of deposit at Shorebank (the Chicago-based community-development banking company), and started a $100-million Global Microfinance Investment Program.
It also implemented one of the reforms sought by Wollman, creating a program within the Social Choice Account for proactive social investments that includes community lending. Previously, TIAA-CREF had negatively and positively screened investments, giving special attention to investments in affordable housing, renewable energy, and economic development.
With the new proactive fund, it has set a target of investing 2 percent of the Social Choice Account in projects with high social impact outside the traditional equity and bond holdings. These include investments in the International Facility for Immunization (speeding vaccinations in developing countries), New York State Environmental Facility Bonds (for pollution control and clean water facilities), and affordable-housing bonds.
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