ACTIVIST SISTERS 
How a small group of nuns in rural Kansas vex big companies with their investment activism

Among corporate America’s most persistent shareholder activists are 80 nuns in a monastery outside Kansas City.

Nestled amid rolling farmland, the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica have taken on the likes of Google, Target and Citigroup — calling on major companies to do everything from AI oversight to measuring pesticides to respecting the rights of Indigenous people.

“Some of these companies, they just really hate us,” said Sister Barbara McCracken, who leads the nuns’ corporate responsibility program. “Because we’re small, we’re just like a little fly in the ointment trying to irritate them.”

At a time when activist investing has become politically polarized, these nuns are no strangers to making a statement. Recently they went viral for denouncing the commencement speech of Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker at the nearby college they cofounded.

When Butker suggested the women graduates of Benedictine College would most cherish their roles as wives and mothers, the nuns – who are noticeably neither wives nor mothers – expressed concern with “the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman.”

After all, women’s education has been a mainstay of their community, which founded dozens of schools. Many of the sisters have doctorates. Most have worked professional jobs – their ranks include a physician, a canon lawyer and a concert violinist – and they have always shared what they earned.

They invest what little they have in corporations that match their religious ideals, but also keep a bit in some that don’t, so they can push those companies to change policies they view as harmful.

This past spring and summer, when many companies gathered for annual meetings with their shareholders, the nuns proposed a string of resolutions based on stock they own, some in amounts as little as $2,000.

The sisters asked Chevron to assess its human rights policies, and for Amazon to publish its lobbying expenditures. They urged Netflix to implement a more detailed code of ethics to ensure non-discrimination and diversity on its board. They proposed that several pharmaceutical companies reconsider patent practices that could hike drug prices.

Up until the 1990s, the nuns had few investments. That changed as they began to set aside money to care for elderly sisters as the community aged.

“We decided it was really important to do it in a responsible way,” said Sister Rose Marie Stallbaumer, who was the community’s treasurer for years. “We wanted to be sure that we weren’t just collecting money to help ourselves at the detriment of others.”

Faith-based shareholder activism is...read more + pictures