Morningstar - Q3 2020 - 71

our strategy," she says. "We are taking their
message into the investment world and organizing
investors to focus on what they say matters."
Her screens fall under two broad categories:
people and planet. The people side encompasses
gender equity, racial justice, fair labor, and
LGBTQ+ equality screens. A human safety screen
eliminates firms like tobacco companies, weapons
makers, and fast-food restaurants. Screens in
the planet category include environmental
sustainability, clean air and water, and animal
welfare. Corporate governance is also a screen.
All of the filters aim to find companies for
the "well-being for the people and the planet,"
Robasciotti says. The effort whittles down
a universe of thousands of companies to about 800,
with the final cull done by a portfolio-optimization
tool that reduces any overweightings, which
tend to be in technology and growth companies.
That gives Robasciotti an impact list of about
600 names from which she constructs an index.
Her portfolios for clients, which she calls
Adasina Social Justice Portfolios, are built from the
index. To broaden its impact, the firm filed an
application in July with the SEC to form an
exchange-traded fund of its social justice index
and expects it to debut in October.

industries negatively and disproportionately
affect people of color.
Among those on the exclusion list are 18
companies cited for prison involvement, such as
for-profit prison companies GEO Group GEO
and CoreCivic CXW and food-service purveyors
such as Aramark ARMK and Sodexo SW:FR. Ten
companies are listed because of their involvement
with surveillance, including Amazon AMZN
and Accenture ACN. Nine for-profit colleges are on
the list. Another 59 companies make the list
because Robasciotti's research indicates that their
work negatively affects Palestinians in the
occupied territory of the West Bank, including
General Electric GE, Motorola Solutions MSI,
Northrop Grumman NOC, and Raytheon
TechnologiesRTX. The list also includes investment
companies such as BlackRock BLK, State Street
STT, CharlesSchwab SCHW, Invesco IVZ, and
Northern Trust NTRS because they own more
than 1 million shares of for-profit prison companies
(as of their latest reported portfolio holdings).
"Stop using your investment dollars to buy
companies that exacerbate racial inequities,"
Robasciotti says. "When publicly traded
companies employ these practices,
the repercussions extend throughout the
financial system."

Divesting Assets to Use Elsewhere

Robasciotti not only wants investors to invest in
companies making an impact; she also urges them
to divest from companies that perpetuate
oppression of people of color. She believes that
persuading shareholders to divest is more effective
than traditional shareholder activism, as proxy
votes are typically nonbinding.
In June, her firm published a list of more than
100 publicly traded companies that don't
meet its racial justice screens.1 She recommends
investors divest themselves of these companies,
which include those that serve the prison
industry, money-bail finance, immigrant detention,
and surveillance. It also includes for-profit
colleges. According to Robasciotti, all of these

Robasciotti again uses a bottom-up approach to
form the exclusion list, reflecting input from
nonprofits such as the American Friends Service
Committee, Poor People's Campaign, Color
of Change, Race Forward, and Project on Predatory
Student Lending.
"In the United States, given the history of
anti-Blackness, we really want to talk to those
organizations that are by and for Black
people and working on racial justice," Robasciotti
says. "We follow the lead of these organizations."

Often, she says, companies try to address the
issue by vowing to increase the number of
women on the board or in management. But those
initiatives don't get to the heart of the issue,
she says. To get there, Robasciotti's firm talked to
organizations working with victims of sexual
harassment, such as the National Women's Law
Center, which revealed a more powerful approach:
Pressure companies to drop forced arbitration
requirements. The arbitration system operates
outside of the courts, so it helps companies avoid
transparency. "Serial sexual harassment is
underpinned by these policies," she says.
Robasciotti's firm teamed up with other activists
in September 2019 to track companies' stance on
forced arbitration.2 Several investmentmanagement companies and institutional
investors, representing about $54 billion in assets,
signed on to support the effort. In June, the list
totaled 500 companies. Many of them have
recently eliminated arbitration requirements for
sexual harassment, Robasciotti says.
"More than 10 million workers can now take
their harassment to court and don't have
to be silenced by a private process that unfairly
advantages the employer," she says.
Burning Bright

It's a positive sign that persistence, publicity,
and organization can lead to social change,
something Robasciotti has been thinking about
and acting on her entire career. Fiercely
determined, in the wake of brutal police killings of
Black Americans this year and with her own
life experience underpinning everything she does,
Robasciotti pushes on. "Changing racist
systems and working to push back on white
supremacy is why I do this work, this week
and always." K
Charles Keenan is a freelance financial journalist.

Justice for Sexual Harassment

This type of listening also helped Robasciotti
confront sexual harassment in the workplace.

1 https://robasciotti.com/2020/06/05/stop-funding-systemic-racism/
2 https://forcetheissue.org/about-project

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