WHOM WE SERVE
The Shareholder Commons (TSC) addresses social and environmental issues from the perspective of shareholders who diversify their investments to optimize risk and return. Our advocacy focuses on the divergence that often emerges between a company’s interest in maximizing its cash flows over the long term and its shareholders’ interests in optimizing overall market returns.
OUR THEORY OF CHANGE
The most important factor determining diversified portfolios’ long-term value is the economy’s intrinsic value, not individual portfolio companies’ relative financial performance. Accordingly, individual company behavior that harms the economy threatens diversified investors, even when that conduct might increase the company’s own long-term value.
But the structure of markets today focuses investors almost entirely on the effect company decisions have on the company itself: shareholder ESG (environmental, social, and governance) activism generally seeks “win-win” changes in corporate behavior that will both improve a company’s social and environmental impact and increase its enterprise value. This strategy implicitly permits business plans that harm social and environmental systems and, consequently, diversified shareholders, as long as those plans maximize value at the enterprise level.
TSC provides tools to diversified shareholders that allow them to prioritize the preservation and enhancement of systemic value. These tools will improve financial returns and better align the financial sector with the global economy’s needs.
OUR MISSION
TSC’s mission is to help diversified shareholders to reprioritize their activism to put social and environmental systems first. Our work demonstrates that shareholders (or managers who represent their interests) have the capacity to force substantive change at companies to improve the economy and thus diversified shareholders’ returns. We seek to catalyze the development of shareholder-created guardrails: minimum rules of conduct that level the playing field.
Recognizing it will take alignment of all our organizations to scale impact globally, we invite you to join the movement as a Steward of Inclusive Capitalism. Together, the collective action of Council members will contribute to a fairer, more inclusive and sustainable future for all people and our planet.
