About SSEN
Member Schools
Organizing Partners
Our Story
How We Started:
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In fall 2020, as students at Arizona State University (ASU) were organizing the Sustainable and Impact Finance Initiative (SIFI) — in order to work with the university's endowment on shareholder engagement — ASU School of Sustainability student David Krantz thought: What if we weren't just doing shareholder engagement here, what if we developed SIFI as part of a network of schools doing similar work? He and a group of other SIFI members pitched the network as part of their first-place winning entry in the Intentional Endowments Network's Student Corporate Engagement Competition. But as they concentrated on building SIFI, the network remained a dream.
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In fall 2022, Krantz joined with fellow SIFI officers, past and present — including Zach Albregts, Nico McCrossan, and Daiva Scovil — to make the network a reality. They reached out to As You Sow and the Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) and agreed to collaborate to launch the Student Shareholder Engagement Network (SSEN) in 2023. Run by the students and for the students as a network of student clubs at colleges and universities across the United States, SSEN members work to collaborate with their institutions' endowments to engage with companies as shareholders to reduce material risk for all stakeholders, drive financial outperformance, and compel social and environmental change. In its first two academic years, SSEN has included five member schools, including Arizona State University, Bard College, Northeastern University, Brandeis University, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
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Looking Ahead:
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SSEN prioritizes collaboration, education, and advocacy to help its members develop and improve their shareholder advocacy, proxy voting, and filing shareholder proposals. The network, founded and run by students, regularly reviews and communicates the results of its work with its members. SSEN is looking to grow to include more schools! Please click "Join" above to complete an interest form if you would like to consider joining SSEN.
Senior Leadership
Featured In
Our university gave us $1 million to invest. We bought (some nominal) shares in Chevron.
More than 200 institutions of higher learning have divested from fossil fuels or announced commitments to do so. This movement attempts to align their investments with their institutional values — but it is not the only way to pressure publicly traded companies to better address climate change. At Arizona State University, we students are working with our school’s endowment to change companies like BlackRock and Chevron from within. That has meant buying, rather than divesting, shares...​
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