 This is the power of divestment, moving big and small dollars for social change. I'm Ann Pernick. I'm with Standout Earth. This webcast is part of our campaign stories winning strategies project which we do with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and it's an opportunity to share lessons learned between activists and we're so excited to have these four activists and all of you on the line today. All right. I'm going to go ahead and introduce everybody and this is the order that we'll have everyone speak today. We have Matt Remley. He is a Hunk Papa Lakota and he lives in Seattle and works for the Office of Indian Education in the Marysville Toalup School District. He is a writer and editor for Last Real Indians. He's the author of Seattle's Indigenous People's Day Resolution, Seattle's resolution calling on Congress to engage in reconciliation with tribes over the boarding school era policies and Seattle's resolution to oppose the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. We recently organized Seattle's campaign to divest from Wells Fargo. In 2014, Matt was awarded Seattle's Individual Human Rights Leader Award and Matt, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Victoria Fernandez is a campaign strategist and coach with four years of climate movement experience. She has mentored and trained six student investment campaigns, mostly in the University of California system to engage in increasingly escalatory direct action through her coordination of the escalation core program and through her staff role as a campaign coach at the Divestment Student Network. As a student, she ran the fossil-free Cal campaign at UC Berkeley. The UC has since divested over $350 million from coal tar sands and a few Dakota Access Pipeline supporting campaigns. Originally from California, Victoria lives in York and she's seeking to build the next generation of youth climate leaders through the Sunrise Movement and welcome Victoria. Jamie Trinkel founded the PDX Divestment Coalition and successfully led the coalition to win a socially responsible investing policy that includes people of color as decision makers and human rights impact investment criteria. And as of April 2017, an end to all corporate investing in Portland. She has published numerous organizing toolkits within LASA, including university toolkits that help students at Columbia and the University of California win prison divestment. Jamie began working against abusive prison conditions and for the targets of our criminal justice system while clerking at the Portland Law Collective as a law student. And welcome, Jamie. And we also have Richard Brooks. He is 350.org's iconic divestment campaign coordinator supporting the organization's efforts to force iconic institutions such as New York's $350 billion pension funds and the Nobel Foundation to divest from fossil fuels. Richard's holds a master's degree in forest conservation from the University of Toronto. He was the past coordinator of Greenpeace Canada's National Forest Campaign where he led corporate campaigns on some of the world's largest brands and achieved lasting protection for ancient forests like the Great Bear Rainforest and welcome Richard. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much to all of our panelists and we're going to close down the webcams for everybody but Matt and let him begin each of our presenters is going to talk a little bit about the campaigns that they have worked on just a few minutes about five minutes each and then I will bring everybody back and I will I have a few questions to ask all the panelists and then we'll have plenty of time for Q&A with our audience. So with that can you just a moment to set up Matt and we'll get going. All right. Great, Matt. Thanks for your patience and take it away. Oh, and I'm sorry, let me pull up your slides too. Okay. Great. I thank you for your patience and take it away. I thank you for your patience and take it away. My name is Islaah Matahan Yellow. I am Charles Remley and I am Donna Harrison. Well, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for having me on this webcast today and thank you and for the invitation to speak a little bit about some of the efforts we've been involved with on the west coast in Seattle around divestment and specifically addressing the core access pipeline and a number of the Tarsans pipeline. So thank you for having me. Just going to run through just some of the steps and actions we've been taking out in Seattle. You know first my involvement with I'm from Standing Rock. I am Hongkopapa Lakota but live out in Seattle. My involvement with the code access pipeline in opposition to it began in January 2016 when family members who were still living in Standing Rock reached out and asked for some support and at that time there was not a lot of information going out about the pipeline and as was mentioned in my intro that I edit and write for Elastro Indians so we started documenting the pipeline and that's kind of where my involvement with DAPO began. In August a group called Food and Water Watch which is also based here in Seattle they released a report that highlighted all the financial institutions that were banking on the core access pipeline and through that we were able to see that you know who some of the top banks involved were and see that Wells Fargo was one of the banks that was heavily invested into the pipeline and knowing that they are who the city of Seattle banked through I reached out to our Seattle City Council member Shama Sawant to see if they would be willing to sponsor an ordinance to divest the city specifically its employee payroll account which is a $3 billion per year account. She said yes. I've had the opportunity to work with Council Member Sawant on a number of other issues. She's pretty amazing lady and so anyways that kind of kicked off a multi-month campaign of building a broad coalition of folks to pass the ordinance. One thing we really wanted to do was highlight the fact that there are many reasons to divest from Wells Fargo which included their funding of the core access pipeline but also highlighting the fact that they're involved in funding private prisons detention centers and stuff like that and through that we were able to build a kind of broad coalition of community members to really push this ordinance and you know we were successful in February of getting Seattle to divest to the tune of three billion dollars. With that though we didn't want that to be our one all be all effort so we began outreaching and working with other communities who are interested in running similar campaigns in either their city and or tribe and we work with folks in San Francisco LA you know all across the U.S. and throughout Europe and to lead a broader divestment campaign and you know you've been seeing a number of cities pass similar ordinances post Seattle. One thing we did coming out of that ordinance and especially after Trump passed his executive order that also gave the green light again for the Keystone XL pipeline is we wanted to kind of get a jump start on not waiting until construction began on that pipeline or you know we wanted to to try to stop it before construction begins so we drafted another piece of legislation went back to our city and what this legislation called for was that if any bank were to give loans to TransCanada for the construction of the Keystone and or other Tarsans pipelines then they would be unable to bid on any city of Seattle contracts so we kind of wanted to put their feet to the fire and again before the pipelines are even built. One thing with that ordinance back to the Wells Fargo ordinance we crafted it as a social responsible banking ordinance because we we did that because we didn't think it would be a victory to simply have Seattle closets accounts with Wells Fargo and then shift them over to like Bank of America or you know U.S. Bank that wouldn't be a victory so the social responsible banking criteria established a whole set of criteria that if any bank is to bid on the city's contracts they would have to be adhering to these various policies and there are things like not funding energy intensive fossil fuel projects like the Apple not investing into private prisons not engaging in predatory lending practices stuff like that so that's all part of that ordinance and we felt that would be a strong message in trying to go after all the banks you know we didn't want again our money to just get sent to another Wall Street evil bank so so yeah we had the Wells Fargo ordinance we passed the the legislation going after potential Tarsans pipelines the next step we took after that a couple things one we're also going after the pension fund which is still in the works but we started targeting JP Morgan Chase who in the past has given a number a lot of money to Tarsans campaigns and so in late March we issued them a letter stating that if they did not come out with a statement opposing or stating that they would not give money to fund the Keystone XL pipeline then we begin a shutdown of JP Morgan Chase banks and we fully knew that they weren't going to you know listen to us so we gave them a couple week deadline to respond and of course they didn't so we started shutting down Chase banks throughout Seattle and that's something that has continued on since then that also coincided with that legislation stating you know letting them know hey Chase bank you know if you you give money to the fund could construct these pipelines and you can't bid on the city of Seattle contracts and we'd add Seattle City Council members involved with that process all this since then is kind of expanded into a broader coalition one of which we recently launched with ourselves last year the Indians Mazda Scott talks the indigenous environmental network on the earth and the International Indigenous Youth Council that is targeting the four pipelines Tarsans pipelines and so our first action was to get we our coalition along with other environmental groups went after a number of large NGOs who released a joint statement just last week we had 15 NGOs stating that they're going to divest from different banks the 17 primary banks were funding both DAPL and all the four Tarsans proposed Tarsans pipelines and that it was about three billion dollars that they're divesting so that's I know it's kind of a lot but in five minutes but you know that's some of the stuff that we got going on in Seattle we just sent a delegation yep there it is a delegation of four water protectors to Europe who did a three four week tour of seven seven different countries throughout Europe going to the banks going to the UN calling on divestment and stuff like that so that's kind of the current state of what we're doing out here I guess lastly I'll just throw out there to on Wednesday we're going back again to our city council for to try to push another piece of legislation which is to get the city to end all ties to Wall Street period and to establish a publicly owned bank on and then we'll get rid of get get our city out of all those banks in one shot so we're going to seek a sponsor for for that public bank later this week and there are a number of other west coast cities who are looking to do the same that we're in partnership with so that's something to be looking for great Matt thank you very much all right um sit tight and we'll bring up Victoria and then uh and then we'll have you back in a few minutes all right Victoria give me just a second I'll pull up your slides appreciate everybody's patience is a new new webcast system today okay there we go and Victoria I think you might be on mute maybe I just took you off okay great great thanks Anne um thanks for sharing about your work Matt that was uh very inspiring to listen to um yeah so I have been part of the student divestment movement uh around the fossil fuel industry for the last four four or so years I started in college um and have been coaching for the last couple of years and mostly work with the University of California uh school system it's a 10 camp 10 campus undergraduate school system we have active campaigns on six of them I'm just going to tell you a little bit about the the history of escalation with that campaign and what successes and wins we've had um and some challenges and learnings um but really so what our students um were looking to do and a lot of uh students on university campuses have been doing for the last four or five years um is trying to get their universities to divest from the fossil fuel industry so the top 200 companies that are on the carbon tracker list um these are you know the companies that we feel are that uh are most responsible for uh the climate crisis and students are really saying we want to shift the conversation on climate we're going to do so through organizing and through direct action our universities are the pillars of our are some of the major pillars of our country and of our society and if they say no to the fossil fuel industry so must the federal government um and other politicians um and at the UC system we have a 90 billion we have 90 billion dollars that are pretty much up for grabs um to be divested from the fossil fuel industry and in the last uh three years the campaign has gotten coal and tar sands to be divested about 200 million from that and then in this last year about 150 million um from some dapple companies so Sunoco or Sunoco logistics and energy transfer partners um but students know that actually the UC has about three billion dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry they've only divested about uh 350 million there's still much more to go um and so last year the students did a series of escalations um at UC Berkeley they did a sit-in inside of the chief investment officer's office to urge the UC system to divest um and so this year we are building off of that um off of that momentum and came and came into the spring with a good escalation plan so we had three different schools um escalate and what I mean by escalation is basically it's uh it's sort of upping up your tactics so doing things that are more intense than you've done before whether that be in the number of people that you're bringing the frequency of your of how often you're taking action in the risk of your action um so sit-ins are sometimes arrestable you're often risking arrest if you decide to stay uh beyond the beyond the the hours of the building and so that is what three of our schools chose to do this um in a three-week period which was very exciting so it was a coordinated escalation right now here you're looking at uh Santa Barbara so they had 400 students over for over a four-day period sit-in just at UCSB alone um what happened was uh a couple weeks earlier you see Berkeley students sat in at their campus about 20 about 50 sorry um two students were arrested um Regent Sherman who is our target who can make the choice to divest decided rather to then to engage with students in a dialogue that he would arrest two of our students um that triggered you can go back to that other one and actually yeah so that triggered uh UC Davis actually to sit in they had um about a hundred students over the course of two days sit in and sleep over at about 40 students each night sleeping over in their chancellor's building at UC Davis up in northern California and then the week after um if you go to the next one then that one is the UC Santa Barbara and so they really culminated um in this growing um and increasing escalation uh over the period of time where in the end that UC Santa Barbara they actually won um they actually won the support of their chancellor so their chancellor chancellor gang came out in support and said I support my students who are sitting in um in their efforts to get the UC divest from the fossil fuel industry which is a really big deal because we hadn't gotten that before all the chancellor's um none had given public support um and in the course of that week after he gave his public support we got three more chancers uh from UC Davis um UC Santa sorry UC uh Santa Cruz and UC San Diego um all to come out in support and that was a huge that was a huge deal to have actually the chancers who are basically the presidents of the each of each campus say out loud publicly that they support the full UC system divest from this is really something we haven't we haven't seen before on this um on this campaign so that was really exciting um yeah and i'm just gonna wrap up real quick um and just say that it was really important that we chose a target and named him publicly so we a lot of our students were saying you know Richard Sherman uh he is the person that can uh change the or have the decision to divest that put a lot of pressure on one person specific person it turns up the heat and allow it doesn't allow people to really um kick it to different to say oh it's not my it's not my choice you know um i think also other other learnings where the escalations happened really quickly they're planned about they're really planned months in advance but um the actual all the actual work that had to be done was really like within a month so if you're feeling excited to do an escalation just go for it i really like encourage just action um in general not to get too bogged down in the planning though the planning is really important um and the last couple of things were just that um the students who did the best escalations just really desperately wanted the uc to divest they um talked to their friends they recruited their friends they were not shy about you know what they wanted to do and um weren't afraid of of creating some of that conflict that happens when you go into a building and decide to sit down and and not leave uh until until you get what you want so yeah and that's uc davis again they did a follow-up action after after uh their reach after their chancellor um supported divestment and yeah i'll end it there thanks sam great victoria thanks sit tight all right we're gonna bring jamie in here and give me just a sec um well i just want to say hey everyone um i'm really excited to to be here and um i want to thank matt and victoria for um sharing about their work it's really inspiring to hear about and how we can all be learning together and working together and um building together um and should i just go ahead just one second i uh for some reason uh yeah you know what go ahead and i will get your slides up here in just a second having a little little uh problem here but i'll figure it out all right so um i work for um and last day um and last day founded the prison divestment campaign in um in 2011 to um take on the shared roots of criminalization of black people people of color and immigrants and to stop a driver of um of math incarceration and immigration enforcement namely the for-profit private prison industry um which sends millions on lobbying um for increased incarceration and increased immigrant detention um and so recognizing that like all of our cities and universities and pension funds are invested in private prisons and the banks that prop them up um unless we pressure them not to be we have been um leading uh with university city um pension divestment campaigns across the country for the last um three years so um today i want to tell you about our recent portland victory portland oregon victory um where in april we um after a three-year campaign pressured the city of portland to stop investing in all corporations um including prison profiteers like wills fargo and jp market chase um and other companies like caterpillar which um destroy the lives and lands of indigenous peoples um from standing rock to palestine um so i really kind of just want to share some some like nuggets about like how we won this big victory because it's it's huge um it's incredible to hear about um the mass momentum there is right now around divesting from wills fargo which has been you know called out for its um fraud been called out for its funding of dapple and been called out for its ties to private prisons and it's called out for its like involvement um in labor abuses and and everything else but um uh hearing what matt was saying earlier about how do we actually get to a place where we're cutting um ties with between our cities um and like wall street so that we're actually building community control is a really exciting place to be and exciting um a visionary place to be with divestment so um in portland we won our victory um by by getting into a long fight there was a three-year campaign and um it required us to build a really strong and diverse coalition that recognized the different ways that um private prison companies um and criminalization um impact our communities differently so we built a powerful and diverse coalition um representing 10 000 portlanders from the immigrant, black, Latino, labor, faith, civil rights and lgbtq communities um we also developed the leadership of the people most impacted by corporate and state violence um and built a movement for human rights here that targeted um all corporate backers of human rights abuses so we did that by community education events actually um doing outreach to um so the immigrant community um with our our coalition partners and they're also talking about um uh criminalization inside blackness right as a way to actually build like black and brown unity um in the struggle for prison divestment um we um made sure that our strategy group was actually um black and brown folks um and most impacted folks only um and that um white ally organizations were there to step up when needed but that the strategy was actually being led by the people most impacted um and organizations representing those those groups um and then we also um took every opportunity the city gave us to um take over community control so um this was a three-year campaign it wasn't easy and there were the city roadblocks everywhere um and so one of the things the city propped up which um was actually um pretty incredible is a socially responsible investing committee and we made sure that our people people with our analysis and also um people of color and people who have been most impacted by systems of criminalization um were actually on that socially responsible investing committee um and we won a human rights impact criteria because we developed leadership of people who had been um held at the northwest detention center in Tacoma um and brought their stories and their voices to to city hall and so that city council was pressured to actually adopt a human rights framework um within their investing policies which to my knowledge is the first um in the country and has been followed suit by um by Berkeley and some other cities um within our three-year campaign we had a lot of opportunities where we could have just been um very narrow in what we decided to pursue um but we refused to um take on divide and conquer tactics that would have um that would have only added a couple corporations to the city's divestment list um you know and so we decided that it wasn't worth it for us just to have Will's Fargo on that list but that it was also important for us to be hand in hand um with um the boycott divest sanctions movement which is fighting for Palestinian rights and liberation to have Caterpillar as a company that we were also asking for divestment from and to be really solid um in working together around that we um we also you know didn't just say like Will's Fargo is bad because of private prisons it's like no like Will's Fargo is bad because of its involvement um and uh destroying uh sacred lands and rights of indigenous peoples in the states and further abuse of labor you know like we we were very intentional in um in building a broad analysis and vision of what corporate and state violence looks like and getting everyone on board with that um and so um in the end we had built up a strong coalition for prison divestment that included 25 organizations but then we were reaching out into other coalition spaces with a boycott divest sanctions movement um with a defund apple movement with a fossil fuel movement and actually getting like really solid around what all of our um the the commonalities between our our targets um recognizing that all of the 17 banks that um are involved in the pipelines are also involved in private prison expansion um and we can draw those connections and we're stronger when we draw those connections um and we also um we also had a campaign that honed in on local connections and so it was really easy for our city to be like oh no like this is an issue that's not directly impacting us um there's no private prisons in Oregon we were able to uplift the fact that um everyone that's picked up here for an immigration offense is sent to a private prison two hours away in the state of Washington and what does that mean for families here on the ground in the communities here and lifting up their their voices and leadership and stories and because this was a three-year campaign um we had the opportunity to um flex our muscles and the leadership of um most impacted communities um in all of these different ways by taking on different targets that presented themselves at different times and growing our power collectively so um you know I already talked about the ways that we were intersectional but we also um were taking on private prisons and shifting power to community control on multiple fronts um community control you know we were we were taking that social investing committee that the city could have just felt filled with a bunch of white male bankers and we took that um and we owned that um and then we also um were able to with our collective power here from the city campaign actually pressure um Oregon senator Ron Wyden to introduce legislation last year to um end tax breaks for private prison companies as a way to try and and shut those companies down um and at least make it so they're not getting any tax subsidies for us from us in the short term right and eventually totally um abolish that industry um wherever we're going next um we got in our in our win uh in April we got um a city commissioner to say that she's now looking into a feasibility study for a municipal bank so we expect her to introduce a resolution on that um any day now hopefully um this summer you know and we see our Portland victory in terms of the prison divestment win the intersectional divestment win really um and um and the municipal banking as um what we can do is we're trying to actually build cities that are are safe and liberatory for all of us in terms of economy in terms of community control um in terms of um building up this alternative vision something that we're calling freedom cities um that actually is uh it builds up the world that we want to live in so we see divestment as the of a milestone and invitation into what we can actually accomplish through deeply intersectional organizing um that works to uplift um and center the people who've been most impacted by um criminalization and oppression and make them safe and whole and all of our communities whole great jimmy thank you very much sit tight all right everybody i'll get faster at this okay and richard we're gonna bring you in here all right let's see if we can do that and let me just bring up your um your slides here so i can just jump into it yeah thank you it's uh honor to be here and sharing the space with other distinguished webinar guests um so uh i'll just take a few minutes to talk a little bit about fossil fuel divestment campaigns and kind of expanding upon um a little bit what victoria said and what matt said as well um a little bit what jimmy said so uh i think that right now particularly in the face of trump pulling out of paris and the regressive actions of the federal government and seeing who's in the federal government in us plus the rise of the right in different countries in the world that uh divestment campaigns are even more important than they were before particularly when they are complemented by um other climate justice environmental justice campaigns that are targeting specific infrastructure projects or pushing for regulation for legislation at different levels of government um when you i think bring those together then we can begin to see change happen and change happened quite quickly um kind of the theory behind the fossil fuel divestment campaigns is similar to the theory behind some of the previous divestment campaigns like the one that um uh took on the tobacco industry and really wore down um the influence of the tobacco industry um which was a contributing factor to dismantling or pride in south africa um so the idea here is that we're going to erode the pillars of support which toria mentioned earlier which is the the societal acceptance of fossil fuel companies and the burning of infinite amounts of carbon and releasing it into the atmosphere so that societal acceptance comes from fossil fuel companies being um uh connected to some of our more most important institutions uh around the country and around the world and when they continue to have uh individuals and institutions and companies investing in them their power remains but as we erode that power these pillars of support begin to collapse so as more banks and more universities and more cultural institutions start cutting their ties with the fossil fuel companies their ability to get access to the halls of power will begin to decrease and right now we're seeing kind of a i think like a last push by these companies and certainly with rex tillerson in the white house and secretaries state they're they're going at it pretty hard um but if you know if we're able to be successful with this campaign these campaigns and others then i think it's only a matter of time we can go to the next slide um so the divestment um you can go to the next slide and the divestment the fossil fuel divestment campaign started in the united states um several years ago quickly expanded uh globally and right around the world we have examples of active and very successful successful fossil fuel divestment campaigns so everywhere from uh new york to south africa to the uk west australia uh brazil and japan and each of these campaigns has their own look and feel and they're i would say culturally appropriate for spaces and where they're where they're taking place so the tone of uh camp of the fossil fuel divestment campaign in japan is going to look different than a university campus in the heart of california for example um which is very interesting from a movement building perspectives you have this kind of a campaign that can be modified um around the world to take into consideration how those um those different societies are set up and cultural norms the success of the of the fossil fuel camp divestment campaign globally is pretty significant so we at this point we have about 730 institutions uh with 5.4 trillion dollars in assets who make commitments to the divest and it really ranges across the board and across these institutions which you see on your screen so universities where i think the the fossil fuel divestment campaign really launched out and really brought a lot of people in a place where a lot of people were recruited into the divestment women and that's expanded since then to focus on capital cities um of countries like france and germany and denmark uh much uh a very quickly growing number of faith institutions um which are beginning to divest and we've brought um buddhist and muslim and christian and jewish um religions who are all represented by these faith institutions who have made commitments to divest uh the medical trades are coming in and various medical associations have made commitments to divest and are actively more actively speaking out uh in a political way around this issue of this issues and we're also seeing the rise of pension fund campaigns um and and getting reasonably uh sizable pension funds to commit to some form of divestment either coal or tar stands divestment all the way up to full fossil fuel divestment um you can go to the next slide so i just want to take a couple minutes to uh focus on a couple of different kinds of institutions that we're working on that are very different from each other so part of the focus of some organizations and groups and individuals is on kind of influential institutions who don't have necessarily a large fund associated with them or a large endowment associated with them but from like a cultural standpoint are very influential and and symbolic and when you're trying to shake the pillars of support by having these institutions make commitments around the divestment um you can have a significant impact for the size of the institution so that includes institutions like the mobile price foundation where there's very active campaign right now to get them to live as fossil fuel companies um last fall there was success reached with American Museum of Natural History which is based in New York City in one of the eminent museums in the United States it's not the world who drastically cut their ties with fossil fuel companies and other types of iconic institutions like the Louvre and the Riverside Church as well when you if you look at past campaigns like the type of tobacco divestment campaign when tobacco companies got kicked out of museums and they got kicked out of magazine advertising they got kicked out of sports events that's what really opened the space create the right environment for the states and federal governments to pursue the tobacco industry with these multi billion dollar lawsuits on behalf of victims of basically cigarettes so you know the divestment movement is about creating space as well as shaking these these pillars of support the next slide also an interesting kind of twist on the fossil fuel divestment campaign is that not necessarily with a lot of campaign pressure but businesses are also stepping up and divesting these are individual businesses or business associations who are realizing that the money that they have in the bank shouldn't be invested in fossil fuel companies and it's significant not only because they're moving their money out of fossil fuel companies but also because they are taking the next step beyond that which is advocating for their peers to divest and advocating for other institutions who are in their operating jurisdiction to divest as well so a good example that is an automated bank um one of the smaller banks are based in New York made a divestment commitment last year and has now become more and more vocal around pushing jurisdictions like New York to divest their pension funds as well so an interesting kind of twist and evolution in divestment campaigns is happening right now you even have Ben and Jerry's which you know with the ice cream company now owned by Unilever one of the largest corporations in the world very active on social media pushing for climate justice but also in particular pushing for divestment campaigns and they were one of the early corporations to make the divestment commitment you can go to the next slide around pension funds so I think one of the kind of new not new frontiers but a frontier where we're seeing a lot of recent successes around pension fights and what's interesting around the pension fights that are happening around the world besides the fact that these pension funds have huge amounts of money that are directly invested either in fossil fuel companies or in the projects that fossil fuel companies are trying to build that's the size of those funds are really significant and as a result their influence is very significant but also the fact that these pension funds represent the the the pensions of literally tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of workers in the United States and around the world is also significant because that that means there's a connection to millions and millions of people and when we're trying to create a movement and build a movement around climate justice having access to those people or having a tie to those folks I think is really significant so as a you know the New York City pension fund with this 180 billion dollars in assets if it were to move towards fossil fuel divestment then that would be a connection with millions of workers in New York City just two more slides and so we're beginning to see you can go to the next slide we're beginning to see the social pillars at least shaking if not falling so one slide back you've got lots of white dudes who are making comments about the threat that they're feeling from divestment and climate justice environmental justice campaigns that are impacting the reputation of fossil fuel companies and affecting their ability to a bring their products to market a be able to build infrastructure projects and do so in a timely fashion that makes sense from a financial standpoint and beginning to see an erosion of their power as well which i think is really significant you can go to the next slide so the question really becomes you know a question of time how slow how quickly can we slow projects reduce the influence of fossil fuel companies to allow for new technologies and better investments to come to the forefront and that brings us to the investment there are basically two ways of reinvesting if you wanted to put it in most simple terms you know a pension fund who wants to get out of fossil fuel companies can just invest those billions of dollars into their existing assets so just top up their investments in company x y or z who's not a fossil fuel company but the impact of that i don't think is this significant as some of the reinvestment work that many of the divestment campaigners are trying to do which is to have that money taken out of fossil fuel companies and go back into something that is also helpful for fighting climate change or supporting community development or equal access to good jobs that sort of thing so we're looking really at reinvestments that is impact investing and so investing in energy efficiency projects that can have a return green loans community solar again that have a return on that investment which is so key for pension funds and other institutions investing in companies that are in charge of building retrofits so making communities more livable and and smarter from an economic standpoint and also investing companies that are lower so you know if you have a billion dollars you can kind of invest it offshore or you can invest in a company that's building solar in new york state and installing solar in new york state so creating those local jobs in the end there's a lot of dismantling that has to be done as well our kind of model of continuous growth as a way to prosperity you know we we know that that's not going to that doesn't work and so as part of this reinvesting we also have to re-envision we have to re-envision economic systems that i think are a lot more local and more community driven and and that don't rely on hyper profits so i'll leave it at that thank you great richard thank you all right let's bring everybody back here i think a lot of you were wisely self-muted so um go ahead and unmute yourself if you're muted okay great we just need yeah there we go and richard i think you might be still on mute there we go okay great all right everyone thank you so much for that um so um to our audience i'm going to ask these folks a few questions and then we want to open it up for your questions so please go ahead and type them in in the question pane and um and uh so that we'll be able to bring your questions in okay um so my first question has to do with this this nice last point that um that richard is making and um about this is gonna this really shows that we need such a huge overall economic change and um and it needs to be more locally based which i think also connects with the issue of divestment big and large and that some people may feel like oh well if i'm not in a huge pension fund what difference does it make you know what what bank i'm banking at or um where my small retirement fund is and i wanted to give everybody the opportunity to talk about the um the importance of thinking about divestment and reinvestment whether you are in a big institution or an iconic institution um or not so um anyone want to jump in on that yeah sorry i was sort of out loud agreeing i'm used to being on me a lot um yeah no i think the for the thing that resonated with me with what you were saying and is like is people saying you know uh oh our pension fund is fund is small oh i'm like an individual oh etc etc i think there's um a lot to be said even about you know the university of california there's like there's 90 billion dollars up for grabs on the table but that the fossil fee industry is one of the richest industries in the world and really what we need to do is we need to show how many people symbolically both pension both like institutions and individuals are are not like standing for it anymore and are like pulling themselves out of being complicit with with the system and are being those pillars um that richard was talking about just just pulling out i really think like the the frequency and like just the symbolicness is is so so important in of itself um when the people like when the people talk the politicians have to have to listen so that's what i that's what i would say about that yeah anyone else want to weigh in i think matt i think it might have been on the divest apple page there was even a like you could navigate for like individuals looking at divestment versus institutions and um which i thought was really great just to encourage people um as individuals to act so um i wanted to see if you want to weigh in or yeah absolutely i mean i agree with with the past two two folks have said that there's also something just to be said for you know divesting your individual account that um you just feel like you're morally doing the right thing so it don't matter how much or how little you have in your account you know that's what we encouraged folks um was that to to close their accounts is that's probably the simplest thing that you can do you know not everybody can get out onto front lines not everybody could make it out to standing rock and you know do do those not everybody can make it down to city council meetings but if you have a bank account that's one thing you do have control over um so i to get to what you're talking about though yeah we we created a uh through our our muzzle scott talks uh home page uh kind of a step by step how to uh both close your own individual account and links to credit unions those sort of places to better places to house your money as well as a step by step guide on how you could get your city and or tribe to divest and pass through social responsible banking policies and now we're working on the step by step on a uh how to how to get your city or tribe to look into uh establishing a publicly owned bank or a tribally owned bank uh because ultimately like i mentioned you know that's the direction we want to go is just to get our our funds out of wall street uh period so you can check that out on uh muzzle scott talks dot org we got a kind of a guideline for how you can go about uh taking steps okay great and i'll send um i'll send around links like that to everybody who's rsvp'd um after the webcast likely via um i'll set chip and mail chip and and send that out to everybody i'll get links from the different presenters um and um i wanted to talk to you about this this public bank issue has come up um i'm really excited in portland to um and i'm interested if that's um um locally that seems like a really great direction that some municipalities are looking at and want to have folks talk about that and then um also hear what people might be thinking about um like in a larger scale richard if there's sort of a more responsible if there's possible to do it on larger scales a more responsible international monetary fund you know is that is that possible what would that look like the the bigger the the bigger that you get unfortunately and i think the experience is is that the a the more bureaucracy that you get but also the less control you have over the types of investments that are made and you know how just those funds may be so i think locally based solutions are um make more sense and they make more sense because they're they're locally based they have the ability to kind of be aware of what's what the opportunities are on the ground um right now there aren't a lot of um there aren't a lot of great examples for large institutions and each large institution has their own kind of investment vehicles and way that they're set up so there's a little bit of like recreating a wheel that we're experiencing with large pension funds for example we're wanting to invest in um in different products there's a lot of homework that they need to do but they're also have investment managers who are paid a lot of money and are quite smarter i think with the right direction can be told you know get out of fossil fuel companies figure out something else that is going to work don't come back to us and say well we can't do it that's you know we we need we need the heads of pension funds to be able to kind of lay down the law and direct the investment managers which they pay for to do the work necessary to find investments that make sense from like a local perspective but also from a carbon footprint perspective as well um yeah and in terms of individuals you know it is sometimes complicated if you're invested in a if your pension is held within a fund as opposed to just at a at a bank and you're investing on your own but there's a lot more products that are popping up every day um you know investment companies large investment companies including black rock have vehicles that you can invest in that are fossil free because they recognize where where things are going there's you know and they want to get ahead of it and make money off of it um so there's lots of options that have become available particularly for individual investors and is that happening for um for other areas too like our um investors able to offer prison free funds are they able to offer um uh specific yeah are there other options are there are you seeing things that are specifically about really controversial topics like you know pipeline projects and stuff are people seeing that from uh from funds or they are fund managers calling you and talking about this um on the prison free funds um i'm not aware of very many um and they might be out of direct prison investments but we know that private prisons are able to expand lobby and diversify into um commodifying reentry services and electronic monitoring because of their their bank rolling by big banks the same banks that are involved in um funding pipeline projects um and so there's some growing awareness that i think there's a lot of um incentive to sort of pass the buck it's like well you know we'll get out of direct investments but we are going to actually look a little bit deeper about what financial systems are allowing us to perpetuate but there is a really excellent resource um the AFSC investigate tool to look into all of the companies that are involved in um profiteering off the corrections industry as well as off the occupation of Palestine um and i would encourage folks to look at that i know that they are actually working till later this year come up with a tool so you can see if your own mutual fund is actually invested um just by putting the fund name um to see if it's invested in those companies oh wow great that sounds like a great resource um and to give uh folks the chance to weigh in on anything we've talked about so far and then i have two two uh kind of strategy questions and then i'll uh and then i want to open it up we've got some great questions coming in from the audience um so i'm interested in how how do people who are campaigning in um in other issue areas how would they be able to judge whether divestment would be um a good tactic for them how did you all know where the campaigns that you're working with know the power that would be there for the issues that you're working on uh i mean for me divestment is a tactic we use when we want to abolish um abolish an industry and abolish a system of oppression and we want to build up something new in its place and so i think that's a common thread among um all of the folks on um here i think also divestment is a tactic to consider um if you want to mobilize uh a lot of people all these all the divestment campaigns that we're talking about be a fossil fuel divestment campaign to present divestment campaigns in particular infrastructure projects and defunding them or divesting them the divestment campaigns i think give them an opportunity to make a connection with with folks that people understand and uh they understand quickly and easily and that helps with mobilization and i think you know part of it is like removing the power of these industries but part of it is also building out a movement for justice and um we have to do them at the same time and uh divestment campaigns create that great opportunity for people power great um i wanted to talk a little bit about the solidarity that is apparent in a lot of these campaigns which is which is really exciting solidarity across different issues solidarity um for indigenous communities you know out non-indigenous allies seeming to use divestment as a way to show their solidarity and i'm just wanting to have our have you all talk a little bit about um how you see that how you see that happening and what you think why you think that's that's true in divestment work i i know for us in seattle was really important to um to build that kind of broad-based coalition like i mentioned um previously that we going into the divestment against wells fargo you know we understand like well as fargo is a bad player for many reasons not just because of their investment in the code access pipeline and or other pipelines but as everybody knows their investments in private prisons and detention centers and stuff like that so um one we just saw that as a uh fertile ground for organizing you know the obviously the more broad-based coalition you can bring then you're just going to be stronger uh sorry about that i in in bringing our message to uh city councils and stuff like that and um you know it's just important to also support one another's work and uh you know and so one of the things we saw uh post the ordinance vote is in seattle folks that were working against the code access pipeline um because we built that partnership with around divesting from private prisons and detention centers uh in seattle they were they've been trying to build a uh a new youth detention center and we were able to see that you know the same banks were behind uh wanting to build this new youth detention center and uh our we had communities organizing against it so you know we're able to kind of go from uh organizing around one issue to the next you know so when they would hold their actions and ravages and stuff we would turn out and support them and uh you know and that's been largely successful uh around the youth detention center because we've now got it to a point where they're looking to pull back on the permits from uh building a new youth prison um it was mentioned you know that we we have the northwest detention center which is just south of seattle uh about 40 minutes south in uh to coma and so uh the same thing when they've been holding hunger strikes down there we bring our coalition of uh no dapple down uh to uh support their efforts but I think it's also given an opportunity to to look at a lot of uh different uh uh projects that are you know the whole west coast is kind of like the new uh target for a lot of these fossil fuel companies whether for coal export terminals uh uh net lng plans and stuff like that and so we're able to look and find out you know the common denominator behind a lot of these projects whether they're prisons or fossil fuels are these banks you know so it gives us all a uh a common target to to go after so yeah I think it's been an effective strategy from that standpoint it gives us a a common target to organize around great jamey did you want to jump in and talk about that for portland for portlands the work here has been um I don't know if I have anything to add that's not really what I said earlier honestly okay that's all right and then um just uh victoria or ritchard give you a chance to jump in and then we'll bring in the the questions um I'm wondering about you know just across uc campuses um just you know you've got campuses each have their own culture and they each have issues that are prioritized and um yeah yeah totally um yeah I think well I think too your first question around like why divestment is so or like easy it seems like an easy solidarity tactic I think it was kind of what Richard was talking about like or uh sorry Matt maybe um everyone can do it there's like pretty much money everywhere that is being used in probably ways that it shouldn't be um and so it's a really easy way for people to get engaged symbolically and just show show their show their support of their difference um yeah for the UCs I think and for your campuses in general I know at Syracuse um there has been so you the UC system basically like schools decided pretty much to unite around and ask because most of the UC money they wanted a target was held by the region so this larger body each campus did have their own like endowment but often they invest it with within the principles of what the UC region set and so but like UC Berkeley has an endowment that is three billion dollars they send two billion of it to the UC region so they keep one billion of it to be held privately UC students UC Berkeley decided to after a couple of years of campaigning around the private one decided to target the the public one because it was easier than like 140 trustees on the private board who aren't they don't meet in central places it's very hard to find out information from decided to public or target the more public endowment that also like we could tell us larger story around the whole UC system that's what really people care about California is like the eighth largest economy in the world and so when UC does something rather than when just a smaller or you know UC Berkeley does something it uh it just it's much bigger impact even though UC Berkeley is a very uh renowned school but in terms of solidarity across issues rather than even just solidarity across campuses with within the same campaign we've seen at Syracuse for example which they did divest they created a coalition across um fossil fuel divestment and prison divestment and I believe there was one other but I'm not remembering exactly uh all of the members represented they did a huge sit-in that created a lot of power and one of the concessions from that was fossil fuel divestment so I think it's an interesting thing in their case for that campaign that was it seemed like that was the right thing to do to create that coalition if you're in the prison divestment campaign though you're you're sad because that wasn't your thing was not the concession um yeah so I think it's like based on strategic um considerations based on your campus climate obviously um yeah and and in those in those cases that worked out but yeah okay great all right um I'm gonna bring in some folks from the audience hopefully we've got Victoria D who's asked a couple questions let me see what happens um uh Victoria we are gonna see if we can uh if you're the first person we can promote to uh all right here we go Tori I hope that you're gonna be here in a second it says it's bringing you in there we go if you want to use uh looks like you're on mute if you want to use your um webcam you can but we'd at least love to hear you looks like you like we should be able to hear you maybe it's not working okay hold on Victoria I'm gonna go ahead and ask a couple of your questions here has anyone had any experience within an investment company or financial corp that is working to help local municipalities divest and reinvest in local communities um she's having trouble locating resources for their municipalities to reinvest um um let's start start with that one anyone have any experience with investment companies that are working to help help with that there's a really interesting company um called transform finance the website's transformfinance.org and uh they work with communities but they also have a network that they've set up called the transform finance investor network basically there's a network of investors who are looking to reinvest or invest in community solutions in um green infrastructure projects green companies that sort of thing so that might be a first place to look and then possibly a point um pension fund or cities that you're campaigning on too. Any other thoughts on that one? Okay we have a question from uh from Nancy Nancy Laurel let's see if we can bring you in here. Hi Nancy I think you might need to unmute oh a little bit you might have to talk a little louder. Yeah my my microphone this is great hi hi um we're having a little trouble with your mic so you've got um you are invested in TIAA craft and you um in their socially responsible fund and you're not impressed with it um saw that it's got you in Wells Fargo and they're resistant to removing you is what your question says because of they say you won't be so diversified. What do our what does our panel recommend when people who who think they're already invested socially responsibly who took that step and um and are finding out it might not be might not be as good as it should be. Panelists do you have any recommendations I'm sure that comes up a fair amount for people. I would say if I can jump in I would say just keep fighting you know the fact that you insisted on getting out of Wells Fargo and they followed through on that is a good sign they are responsive at least with some pushing and um you know their item unfortunately they're not a lot of simple solutions where you can just say hey get me out of this tonight and go into this and everything's clean. We're in a very evolving place um at least from a fossil fuel investment standpoint in terms of what the options are available um so I don't know if that gives you much comfort but if you have the strength to keep fighting to clean up your fund then and do so I probably know that you're not alone that there are others as well who are probably having the same issues with TIA craft and I know that there's a couple of organizations who are quite focused on getting TIA to divest from fossil fuel companies some of the banks and also from companies who are involved in deforestation as well. Hang on Nancy Laura I'll be able to I'll be able to pull you out of it just hang tight for a second okay we've got um we have a couple more questions some I will get to the presenters afterwards there's one that was asked anonymously that I thought might be a really interesting one to to close on it's very big picture for everybody says how can you conduct this divestment reinvestment campaigns while we're remaining critical of the ideology of profit motive which is the root cause of why these campaigns are necessary in the first place and I just want to invite any panelists who want you to weigh in on that. Yeah um first thing that comes to me is in your narrative um yeah the things that we said a lot in our divestment campaign were that uh you know the fossil fuel industry is putting people over profit you can really speak well I think to uh that a lot of the motivation behind the crises that we're facing is is greed and um and people trying to pad their pockets basically the few over the many um so I think if you believe yeah if you believe that and you want to remain critical of it I think you can do that like within yourself and also keep running campaigns and also can do that in your narrative around a campaign as well but I think the if you if you decide that those campaigns are worth running and include that in your narrative we don't want to undermine your campaign uh with with sort of like ideological um things that might confuse either the public or or the target them themselves yeah um something that comes to mind for me is thinking about um uh not necessarily offering reinvestment alternatives in uh the typical uh option not saying that it's okay to just invest in another company because we know that most of the companies that are really big especially for city investments or your pension investments like might uh are very likely not um ethical in some way or another um and so I'm really inspired by the story of the CSU LA the California State University Los Angeles um divestment work where um black led student organizing pressured the university to divest from prisons and to do concrete reinvestments in black students and students of color in terms of recruitment and retention um like a black only dorm um psychological services like counseling and uh an educational counseling so other forms of commitment that actually wind up seeking to reinvest wealth in communities that have been most impacted by um our disastrous and extractive economy um in ways that don't necessarily get the same return um that we that our cities and pensions and invest uh expect and we can push them to expect something different anyone else want to jump in on that or any other um closing thoughts before um we're going to um let the audience go and then I have just a couple last questions for any panelists who can who can stay on but any last um thoughts for the audience before we close down this part I would just share that uh we look at divestment as just a tool in our toolbox and um of strategies we can utilize uh in uh going whatever the campaign is you know whether it's addressing the pipelines or or uh prisons and stuff like that that um I think sometimes some of our movements we get kind of stuck in thinking there is just one way of going about uh addressing whatever the issue it is whether it's via the courts or you know a direct action or just doing um uh you know going one particular route and I think that's uh we need to embrace all a variety of these strategies and that's uh the kind of message we put out you know this is just a tool that we can utilize you know go after the banks go after money um but that doesn't mean we're going to stop uh doing direct actions that doesn't mean we're going to stop uh using utilizing other uh methods for uh seeking the change that uh we're looking for so just you know throwing that out there you know look at it as a tool to put in your in your organizing toolbox great anyone else want to jump in all right I want to thank all of our panelists so much Matt Victoria Jamie Richard thank you so much for being here and our audience