In the United States, 52% of  the adult population has an ownership stake in companies through the stock market. Because publicly-held corporations are accountable to their shareholders, there is an underutilized channel for exerting broadly-based public pressure to improve corporate human rights behavior. Gabe Rissman is one of the founders of Yourstake.org, a platform that allows individuals to use their shares to ask a company to improve its human rights behavior in tandem with other socially responsible investors, leveraging their collective financial power.

In his article, Rissman recounts how their social enterprise is able to create social impact from the same sets of actions that create commercial value. He describes some of the challenges their start-up is addressing in unlocking the potential influence of individual investors, and he invites human rights organizations to consider leveraging the shareholder voice of their individual supporters, too.

The full article can be found on Open Global Rights.

Gabe Rissman is the co-founder and president of Yourstake.org. Gabe also co-founded Real Impact Tracker, which scores the social impact of investment funds. Gabe is the former co-head of Yale’s Dwight Hall Socially Responsible Investment Fund, which became the first student investment fund to file a shareholder resolution. Gabe graduated from Yale College with a BS in Physics.

Photo by Jose Moreno on Unsplash