ICCR commits to an ongoing process to make racial justice manifest throughout ICCR’s internal mission, structures, culture and work and through our collaborations and advocacy with members, partners, and stakeholders. Our goals will be reviewed and amended annually by the ICCR Board and Leadership, with updates shared within ICCR and its broader community. We recognize that since ICCR is a membership organization, any sustainable change to who we are and how we operate requires deep and ongoing reflection, conversation, and commitment from us all.
An authentic commitment to racial justice is a commitment to an ongoing journey of listening, learning, action, and accountability. For ICCR, this commitment is an essential element of our organizational mission to uphold the inherent dignity of all people and advance the structural changes necessary to ensure an economy that works for all. Our journey to explicitly center racial equity at the heart of our organization’s mission and work comes from a place of humility and a willingness to stumble, reflect, and correct course.
The need for ICCR—an organization working to hold the world’s most powerful corporations accountable for their impact on people and planet—to make a public commitment to racial equity and to take concrete steps to embed this commitment in our structure and work is clear and urgent. As faith and values-based investors, we see persisting racial inequity not only for the moral and ethical threat it represents but also as a civil rights threat to our democratic structures and a financial threat to the U.S. economy and the global financial system. The U.S. economy was built upon a legacy of exploitation of Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, communities, and working people. While today’s drivers of racial inequity are many and complex, one thing is clear: racial inequity is so embedded in our economy it can only be addressed as the systemic risk it represents. As investors actively participating in the markets, we are called to understand our role in perpetuating these inequities and develop proactive strategies to address them.
We must regularly reflect on who we are (the composition of our membership and staff, our governance structures, internal policies and procedures, and the ways we communicate our values) and what we do as an organization (our priority programs and campaigns as well as our methods of engagement) to ensure that our structures and actions match the strength of our intentions and commitments. We expect this racial equity commitment statement will enable accountability for ICCR’s board and leadership and hope that our experiences and learnings can guide our members and partners in sustainable investing.
Achieving environmental justice, health equity, fostering respect for human rights, and finding the appropriate solutions to address the climate crisis will not be fully meaningful unless they remediate the racial inequity and discrimination at the root of so many of these issues. ICCR members must continue to partner with impacted communities, civil society, and financial institutions to build a society where all individuals and groups can thrive and prosper. We want to recognize that since our founding, ICCR members, particularly faith-based investors, have consistently used their leverage to advance racial equity in the private sector. However, this legacy and past leadership should not become the laurels we rest upon, but instead the catalyst that inspires us to ask what is demanded of us today as we seek to build an inclusive economy that centers racial justice.
Learn more about we are enacting our racial justice commitment below:
A successful and vital ICCR board reflects a diversity of backgrounds and experiences, both to provide a range of perspectives and expertise and to authentically reflect ICCR’s growing membership. The ICCR Governance Committee will regularly review the board diversity matrix, nomination process, and leadership pipeline to ensure that the ICCR board is reflective of this commitment.
ICCR will establish a board-level racial equity advisory committee that will oversee the actualization of ICCR’s racial equity commitment, including in organizational strategic planning, and will hold organizational leadership accountable for measurable progress on an ongoing basis.
ICCR commits to developing a membership diversity strategy that intentionally recruits more racially diverse organizations and incorporates them fully into our community and work. We further commit to reviewing our membership governance structure to correct any policies that may reinforce racial inequities, contribute to power imbalances or otherwise be perceived as discriminatory.
If we are to address the systemic inequities at the heart of global markets, we must first ensure that ICCR’s own investment practices aren’t unintentionally contributing to them. ICCR has embedded a commitment to racial equity within its socially responsible investing policy for its endowment, including in its selection of investment managers.
ICCR is committed to building a diverse team and organizational culture within ICCR that reflects our commitment to racial equity. Initial goals will focus on our hiring and retention practices, improving internal culture, developing a bias reporting mechanism, and creating a staff racial equity committee.
ICCR will continue to use its institutional voice and influence, through its external communications, to advocate for systems that espouse greater equity and inclusion. We will further develop an ICCR leadership communication strategy to ensure that ICCR’s Board Chair and CEO are internally communicating regularly and intentionally that racial equity is a core value of all that ICCR does.
When working with outside vendors, ICCR will seek to contract with businesses that are owned/operated by under-represented groups (including but not limited to women, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latin, LGBTQIA+, and other underrepresented communities) with preference shown to vendors with a unionized workforce.
Equity is central to and explicit in all our priority programs, including our work to Advance Worker Justice, Climate and Environmental Justice, and to foster Equitable Global Supply Chains and Health Equity. In addition to their direct impact on corporations and their stakeholders, these programs are part of a larger movement to build more racially equitable social and financial structures that include the full participation of people of color. We will ensure that any organizational strategic planning (such as our prioritization process) includes a racial equity lens and will assess our ongoing engagement methodology so that our work more explicitly accounts for racial power imbalances and seeks targeted strategies to tackle them.
Achieving racial equity in any of ICCR’s priority areas requires long-term commitment and strategic cooperation between multiple stakeholders – principally the stakeholders who are directly impacted by negative corporate practices, which are frequently BIPOC communities. ICCR commits to intentional outreach to these communities to encourage their participation in investor engagements on relevant issues.