JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
The sunflowers and wheat fields of rural Kansas are a long way from Wall Street, but in the small town of Atchison, some unlikely investors are making names for themselves as outspoken shareholder activists. Rose Conlon of member station KMUW has the story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BENEDICTINE SISTERS OF MOUNT ST SCHOLASTICA: (Singing) 'Tis a gift to be simple. 'Tis a gift to be free.
ROSE CONLON, BYLINE: The Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica start each day together in their chapel, praying and singing hymns. The 80 nuns at this rural monastery, about an hour's drive from Kansas City, live simply. They hold all their belongings communally. But over breakfast, Sister Judith Sutera says that for several decades, the community's aging membership has all but forced them to invest in the stock market for retirement.
JUDITH SUTERA: Some people are really troubled by the fact that we have assets, enough to invest. And I think there's a misunderstanding in terms of - we have to have a certain amount of money in reserve because we have people we have to take care of.
CONLON: The monastery's health care costs are growing. Most of the sisters are 70 or older, and there are fewer younger sisters bringing in wages. They see investing as a necessary evil. Sister Rose Marie Stallbaumer says they don't buy stock in weapons makers and try to limit their holdings in fossil fuels.
ROSE MARIE STALLBAUMER: And that had an effect on our investments. So we maybe didn't earn as much as we could, but that was important for us, to take that stand.
CONLON: The sisters have also become advocates for change at the companies they do invest in. At shareholder meetings, they bring resolutions demanding that large corporations give their workers health insurance or adopt climate-friendly policies. Stallbaumer remembers going to her first meeting 20 years ago to oppose the energy company Halliburton's Iraq War contracts.
STALLBAUMER: When I presented the resolution, someone from the company held the mic in front of me so that he could pull it away if I said something they didn't want me to say.
CONLON: The company didn't take the mic, but most shareholders did vote down the resolution. Halliburton sold its division that handled the military contracts in 2007. These resolutions are nonbinding and few pass, but they can still build momentum around a given issue, says Sarah Haan, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.
SARAH HAAN: If you're corporate management and you see that 49%, 40%, 35% of your shareholders all want you to do something, you need to at least start thinking about that thing.
CONLON: These days, sister Barbara McCracken leads the monastery's shareholder activism. She flips through resolutions from the spring.
BARBARA MCCRACKEN: Netflix. Well, their code of ethics is what that one is about. And then Tyson, of course, is the child labor audit is what we wanted. And Verizon is a big one, too. We wanted lobbying disclosures, how they spend their money on lobbying.
CONLON: Netflix says their code of ethics contains strong antidiscrimination protections and added that most shareholders opposed the nun's resolution. NPR reached out to Tyson and Verizon as well, and neither responded.
MCCRACKEN: You know, we're not trying to bankrupt the company or something. We want them to develop some kind of a social conscience, particularly regarding global issues, which includes the environment, and then low-wage issues and racial justice issues.
CONLON: For McCracken, it's a way to live out the principles of Catholic social teaching, which emphasizes the rights of workers and caring for God's creation. Michael Matheson Miller is a senior research fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which argues for limited regulation of markets and companies. He agrees with many of the sisters' principles but thinks shareholder resolutions can raise costs for consumers and says they're often ineffective.
MICHAEL MATHESON MILLER: When you spend a lot of time maybe doing external work, it is a distraction from real ethics. It creates a place where people get pressured to kind of - like, you have to support all of these groups just to be left alone.
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CONLON: Back in Atchison, chickens cluck on the monastery's grounds and insects buzz in its gardens. McCracken says these practices, like the shareholder activism, are efforts to invest in their ministry.
MCCRACKEN: Because where are we going? And how do we live gospel values today in a radical way?
CONLON: A question, she says, she'll spend her life trying to answer.
For NPR News, I'm Rose Conlon in Atchison, Kansas.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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