Goal of Fossil Free campaign
We want institutional leaders to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil fuel companies, and divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years.
SOURCE: gofossilfree.org
A Ball State student activism group has joined a national movement to start conversations on campus about ceasing university investment in fossil fuels.
Go Fossil Free Ball State is part of more than 300 colleges and universities taking part in the Fossil Free campaign.
The group is raising awareness through a petition and a report to the Board of Trustees.
The report, which focuses on student and donor perspectives, along with climate science and ethical issues, will be completed later this week. The Board of Trustees will review it at their next meeting.
Representative from the group Kourtney Dillavou, a fifth-year landscape architecture student, said the goal is to have universities divest funds in the top 200 publicly-traded companies that hold the majority of the world’s fossil fuel reserves.
The group started its petition before Muncie’s Living Lightly Fair in September and since then have amassed more than 400 signatures.
“A petition is leverage for us to go to the Board of Trustees or Ball State Foundation and say a lot of us don’t feel it’s right to have money in the fossil fuel industry,” Dillavou said. “We feel it would be better to put our money into green technology instead.”
Dillavou said Go Fossil Free is working with Students for Responsible Consumers, Emerging Green Builders and other student organizations.
“This needs to be a diverse student group,” she said. “We aren’t gong to get anywhere if we don’t have large support from the students.”
The Ball State foundation has assets totaling more than $216 million, according to bsu.edu. Because it is a private corporation, its investments are not available for public scrutiny, said chief investment officer Thomas Heck.
Although the foundation does not publicly disclose its holdings, Heck said if the Board of Trustees adopted a policy of divestment, they would be responsible for executing it.
The foundation has not yet run any numbers on the historical impact of revenue returns and the potential economic impact of divestment, but there are economic considerations, Heck said.
“The fewer things you invest in, the less opportunity there is for investment return and the less opportunity to diversify risk,” Heck said. “This is a general rule.”
Heck said it is too early to imagine what the implementation of divestment would look like if the Board decided divestment was something they wanted to go forward with.
“We are early in the discussion and we have to think about what the ramifications are and the alternatives,” he said. “We are certainly looking at the position of other universities as this question comes up and we’ll take our reasonable and considerate approach to the issue.”
According to Go Fossil Free, seven colleges and universities have already committed to divest in fossil fuels, and 22 cities have made the same pledge.
In May 2013, San Francisco State University became the first and only state university to commit to divest in fossil fuels.
The SFSU foundation finance and investment committee “manages a $51.2 million endowment for the university” and voted unanimously to “limit direct involvement in fossil fuel companies.”
The Fossil Free campaign is modeled on a similar approach through divestment that was used in the mid-1980s against South African apartheid. According to Go Fossil Free, 155 campuses divested from companies who did business in South Africa helping to end apartheid.
According to an analysis released in January by investment-management firm Aperio Group, divesting in fossil fuel companies does not add or subtract value to an investment portfolio. The report said the increased risk from divestment is very small.
Dillavou said divestment is the next green step for Ball State.
“Our lives are more important than economic well-being of a company,” she said.
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