Putting shareholder power to work for nature
The Maugean Skate. Photo: Neville Barrett, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies
Drawing on the Reichstein Foundation’s recent experience, CEO Rachel Ball shares how trusts and foundations can use their share portfolios to drive positive change for nature.
At the Reichstein Foundation, we’ve spent the past few years moving beyond a traditional investment portfolio towards an approach that puts our capital to work for the causes we care about. Along the way, we’ve drawn on nearly 60 years’ experience backing social and environmental change through our grant-making, including a conviction that advocacy is one of the most powerful levers for driving reform.
Why shareholder advocacy
Shares commonly make up around 50– 60% of foundations’ portfolios; that’s over $25 billion across Australian philanthropy. We tend to treat these investments as neutral, just money sitting off to the side generating income for our grant-making. But capital is never neutral.
The potential for impact lies in seeing our shares for what they are: ownership stakes in large companies whose decisions play an outsized role in driving the environmental harm our sector seeks to combat. Active ownership through, for example, engagement with fund managers or corporations, voting on resolutions and participation in investor coalitions that lobby for law and policy reform, can help us influence corporate actors driving the climate and nature crises.
Save the Skate campaign
One example of this work is the Save the Skate campaign.
The Maugean Skate’s last remaining habitat is Macquarie Harbour on Tasmania’s west coast. This creature has survived for over 60 million years, but recently industrial salmon farming has forced the skate to the brink of extinction.
I first heard about the skate from Tasmanian NGOs, Environment Tasmania and Neighbours of Fish Farming back in 2024. As we entered funding partnerships with these organisations, I learned what the skate was up against. The salmon industry exercises immense influence over state and federal governments. Private and foreign-owned companies run the farms. One of the few remaining players open to influence is the supermarkets, including Coles and Woolworths, that stock Macquarie Harbour salmon.
The supermarkets were becoming less responsive to NGOs working to save the skate, so they decided to try a different approach. Local, national and international groups, along with the Reichstein Foundation and Ethinvest, joined with the Sustainable Investment Exchange (SIX) — a trading platform that works with NGOs to run shareholder campaigns — to build a coalition of investors concerned about extinction risk. The result was the Save the Skate investor campaign.
The power of collaboration
Together we’ve worked to put pressure on Coles and Woolworths, including through shareholder resolutions at the last two AGMs achieving votes of over 40%, the most supported nature resolutions in the world.
In response the supermarkets are paying attention, the skate has a front row in their sustainability reports, and they’ve removed sustainable labels from their Tasmanian salmon products.
However, they haven’t stopped sourcing salmon from Macquarie Harbour. The skate is still in peril. Numbers are down this year, and the species is just one extreme weather event away from extinction. The next step is to focus on the Director elections at the upcoming Woolworths AGM. To get involved, visit the SIX website.
How trusts and foundations can get involved
Save the Skate is just one campaign in a growing landscape of activist shareholders demanding more from corporate Australia. Another current example, this time led by a partnership between SIX and the Australian Conversation Foundation, is a campaign to stop the big four banks from funding deforestation. Apart from SIX, Australian NGOs ACCR and Market Forces also lead shareholder advocacy initiatives that foundations can join.
Overseas, the Friends Provident Foundation in the UK worked with civil society organisation ShareAction to engage HSBC on net zero transition and fossil fuel finance, later withdrawing a shareholder resolution following important commitments secured from HSBC.
In the US, AJL Foundation recently joined a picket line with workers from Brazilian meat producer JBS, stating that as JBS shareholders, it’s their fiduciary duty to stand with JBS workers as they strike. Incidentally, JBS owns Huon Aquaculture — Australia’s second-largest salmon producer that operates multiple farms across Tasmania, including in Macquarie Harbour.
Even if foundations don’t want to get involved in specific campaigns, we could be speaking to our fund managers about what environmental resolutions are coming up and how they’re planning to vote. These decisions are directly relevant to our mission and expertise, and we shouldn’t outsource them without active oversight. Other steps we could take include:
- considering the expertise, track record and reporting capacity on investor advocacy and stewardship in our tender processes for new advisors and fund managers (we’re happy to share our experience);
- collaborating to develop and adopt sector-wide voting guidelines on climate and nature;
- engaging in stewardship initiatives with other investors, pressing the Federal Government to take action to address the climate and nature crises.
In Australia, many of the large super funds regularly engage in shareholder advocacy and stewardship, recognising that it’s in the financial interest of their members for them to do so (climate and nature risk being two of the greatest threats to portfolio value). As foundations, we have a more flexible regulatory framework than super funds, and we operate free from competitive commercial constraints. We also have expertise in how to drive change at scale, and connections with the communities and changemakers on the ground. We’re well placed to do this work, and we will be leaving potential impact on the table if we neglect it.
