Proxy Voting
How Shareholder Advocacy and Proxy Voting Can Drive Meaningful Change — and How You Can Help Protect It
Activism and Impact in an Environment of Hostility and Misinformation
Shareholder advocacy and proxy voting are critical tools equity investors use to influence corporate decision-making and drive systems-level change. As stockholders and, thus, part owners of the companies they invest in…
Proxy Voting: A Critical Tool for Individuals and Investors to Influence Corporate Behavior
By Elizabeth R. Levy
Proxy voting enables equity (or stock) investors to participate meaningfully in the decision-making process of the companies they own. Proxy voting is one tool in a broader ecosystem of shareholder advocacy that enables shareholders to influence the policies governing…
Proxy Voting: 2024-25 Year in Review
Equity (or stock) investors are actually the owners of the companies they invest in. This ownership gives us the right to express our opinion on the management and governance of our companies. Clean Yield’s engagement work is one way we can…
2022 Proxy Season Wrap-up: Stubborn Optimism
Stubborn optimism needs to motivate you daily; you always need to bear in mind why you feel the future is worth fighting for.
–Christiana Figueres
In the world of shareholder engagement and advocacy, summer is the quiet season. The hustle…
2021 Proxy Season Wrap-up
It’s been a year. Between a race reckoning, a global pandemic, an attack on the U.S. Capitol and the core tenets of our democracy, a lot happened. Something else happened this past year. Shareholders held corporations to account on these…
2019 Proxy Season Wrap-Up: Drawdown, Discrimination, and Drug Prices
We’re always interested in new and action-oriented ideas. One source of inspiration last year was Project Drawdown by Paul Hawken. Drawdown is a book that ranks the 100 most impactful solutions for climate change, based on their potential greenhouse gas…
From sticky to sweet at Tractor Supply (and 2018 Proxy Season Wrap-up)
Concerned about bees? We are too. We see the important role they play in supporting a healthy, sustainable food system. Also, we like honey. Last summer, the Clean Yield team discovered that Tractor Supply Company, a chain of box stores…
Clean Yield successfully withdraws proposal on political transparency at Alphabet
Clean Yield is pleased to announce the withdrawal of a shareholder proposal filed at Alphabet seeking increased political transparency. Since Clean Yield filed the proposal, Alphabet has meaningfully strengthened its systems for managing political activities. Most notably, the company has…
2017 Proxy Season Wrap-up
The 2017 proxy season brought new highs and lows for shareholder advocates. The volume of shareholder voices reached new decibels this year, with record votes in support of climate risk disclosure at major energy companies Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum, and…
Proxy Music
Readers, grab a cocktail and prepare to hear incredible but true tales from Clean Yield’s 2015 proxy season, a compendium of surprises both pleasant and unpleasant, some outright success stories, ironic twists, and at least one instance of bad luck.…
Clean Yield’s 2014 Proxy Season Wrap-Up
Forget Game of Thrones. The real drama this year concerned the fate of Clean Yield’s shareholder proposals and the outcomes of our dialogues with corporations. We’ve been in talks with HBO — for what seems like forever — about a…
Proxy Help Is On The Way!
April is the cruelest month, wrote T.S. Eliot, and he didn’t even have to deal with an influx of corporate proxy ballots, guiltily cluttering his in-box and begging to be voted in time for their respective stockholder meetings.
As we…