Social Responsibility

NEGATIVE SCREENS

We encourage our clients to provide us with social screens and we respect our clients’ ability to reject investments for moral reasons. However we are reluctant to define social screens in ways that could seriously impair investment results for the sake of the appearance of purity.  If clients do not specify their own screens, we will apply our default screens listed on the following pages.

Our screens are based on the idea that the primary reason to practice socially responsible investing is to achieve meaningful improvements in the behavior of companies.

• We will exclude enterprises engaged in intrinsically destructive activities that can only be changed by political action, since those companies will not voluntarily go out of business in response to shareholder pressure.
• We choose companies that already have constructive policies which we attempt to improve through shareholder dialog.

We cannot guarantee that the information we use to implement these screens is accurate or complete.