The idea came to Thom Clark in the early 1970s–he was young (in his early 20s), involved in the anti-Vietnam War peace movement, and working in the Loop. He didn’t think it up himself: “A local group, I think with church sponsorship, was doing research, looking at the investment patterns of local banks,” he recalls. The idea was to see which bank contributed least to an immoral war.
Today you can judge your bank or savings and loan by its annual Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) statement, which it is required to make available to anyone who asks.
If you’re into plastic, you can use a Working Assets Visa card, and then vote on which groups working on which issues should receive the donations pool–in 1988, $218,452 was generated when the operation set aside its marketing fees and allowed a percentage of each card transaction to be set aside.
The 322-member Boston-based Social Investment Forum (of which Chicago banker Joan Shapiro is outgoing president) estimates that as of mid-1988 some $450 billion was invested according to social criteria of one kind or another. That is a little more than one-tenth of the total $4.2 trillion invested in stocks and bonds that are traded on the largest U.S. exchanges.
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But logic seems to have been wrong. Between 1981 and 1987, social-investment accounts managed by United States Trust Company of Boston grew faster than the Standard & Poor’s index and Shearson Lehman Government Corporate Bond index. In its February 20 issue on “The Best Mutual Funds,” Business Week describes Calvert’s “managed growth” social-investment portfolio as having “very low” risk and “very good” performance. Working Assets’ record has also been quite satisfactory: on a recent weekend, its rate of return was slightly higher than that being offered locally on six-month certificates of deposit–“without any penalty for early withdrawal,” says midwest associate Ron Freund. More technical market analyses confirm that social investments in general have done at least as well as the market at large.
Doing good by doing well–how could anyone be against it? Let us count the ways:
