SRI Hosts First Speaker Series

After months of planning, the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) started the spring term with an event called Socially Responsible Investing Week, a speaker series focusing on investment as a tool for social change.

“One of our major goals for this year was to have a student presence,” Alexa Beyer ’15.5, co-President of the SRI Club said. “This week in a lot of ways was designed to really give value to an average student who doesn’t know about this or doesn’t think about these issues. We want to be a student group that people go to about this stuff. We want to make ourselves known and make these issues heard.”

The week began with an Atwater dinner, followed by a workshop at the CCI. The week also featured three lectures by both local and visiting speakers: Randy Kritkausky, Visiting Scholar in Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability at the Monterey Institute of International Studies; Tom Mitchell, Managing Director of mission-related investing at Cambridge Associates, a leading investment consulting firm; and Pier LaFarge ’10.5, Co-Founder and CEO of Spark, a company that uses crowd funding to invest in energy efficiency projects.

“If I had to pick out a theme among the speakers we’ve heard so far, it was democratizing investment, and democratizing the way these decisions are made,” Beyer said.

The decision to partner with CCI derived from a desire to appeal to a larger range of students. Allie Cohen ’16.5, who worked closely on the collaboration explained, “We reached out to them [the CCI] to see if they would help us advertise — so that students could see this not only as a learning opportunity but also as a potential career opportunity.”

The effort yielded the desired effect; the Atwater dinner was filled to capacity and a large number of students who are not members of SRI or of Divest Middlebury attended other events.

“A lot of SRI members are attending, but I’m seeing a lot of new faces too, people I don’t know,” said SRI co-President Virginia Wiltshire-Gordon ’16.  “That’s really exciting because it means we’re reaching more of our campus and really pulling students in to help them become educated and for them to help educate us as well.”

“For example, after Randy Kirtkausky’s talk, most of us stayed after for a solid 20 minutes talking to him about what he had said and about Middlebury and the future of socially responsible investing. It was a really great learning experience for everyone there,” she added.

During the week, the CCI hosted a workshop called “Careers and Pathways into SRI.”

“It was about giving the students some resources and tools, because it’s not always easy to find entry points into that area,” said Associate Director for Career Services Tracy Himmel-Isham. “I think they were really happy to see some of the resources, some of which were new to them.”

These resources include the USSIF Directory, a database of investment organizations based in the US and England, and the Vermont Business for Social Responsibility Conference, a local program that provides Middlebury-specific internships. Another idea from the workshop was for students to find a specific entry point into a desired industry.

“Every student on this campus is going to have to think about what they’re going to do when they leave and it’s so rewarding for us to be able to know that students want to engage some of our expertise and want to tap into us to help them find alumni or parents that have a tie here and can be real assets.”

“The two events that we directly were involved with were meant to be small events. They were very one-on-one interactions on intimate levels,” Director of the Center for Careers and Internships Don Kjelleren added. “We absolutely love and look forward to working with the student groups. It makes our work so much more enjoyable and successful when students are interested in partnering with us. That’s a really positive model and one that we want to emulate whenever possible.”

The SRI Club was also happy with the results of the partnership. “Partnering with the CCI really puts into effect our original intention of the week, which was to give value to students in a concrete way. By doing a variety of speakers and then by saying, ‘Here are some career opportunities and here’s how to find an environmental internship,’ we’re giving them concrete value, even if they’re not interested in investing specifically,” Beyer said.

“I get the impression that people have been coming to the events not just because their friends have been dragging them there but because it’s something they actually want to learn about and are interested in,” Cohen said.