NORTHAMPTON — Less than five years after passing a resolution to sell off all its investments in fossil fuels, the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence has achieved its goal.
Society officials said the organization has completely divested its endowment holdings in the top 200 fossil fuel companies nine months before their August 2019 deadline.
Although the church did not have any direct investments in fossil fuel stocks, its mutual fund holdings had fossil fuel stocks in them, accounting for between 5 and 10 percent of the organization’s overall $1 million endowment, according to society treasurer and trustee Dave Nelson.
“It’s a moral stance,” said Sarah Metcalf, a member of the church’s Climate Action Group who pushed for the divestment, on Saturday. “It helps us align our actions with our beliefs and it can be a discussion point that moves into the boards of trustees of other major institutions.”
In the spring of 2014, Unitarian society members made the case that in the fight against global climate change the church could take action by divesting its endowment holdings in fossil fuels.
Although the resolution, introduced by the church’s board of trustees, passed with nearly unanimous support, Metcalf said the decision was not reached without concerns by some members.
The concern was that the church would be hurt financially by divesting and could fall behind on its obligation of paying employees a living wage. But Metcalf said that through informational sessions and years of research, the church met its divestment goal while remaining financially responsible.
Accomplishing full divestment from the fossil fuel industry is “gratifying for our Climate Action Group, and it hadn’t started out that way,” Metcalf said. “And yet, our congregation has very much come to a strong, unified concern about climate change.”
Through research on how other organizations such as municipal governments, congregations and educational instructions have achieved similar divestment goals, Nelson says the church decided to invest in exchange traded funds, or ETFs, which offered low expense ratios while also being free of fossil fuel companies.
“We made a lot of policy changes in order to diversify as well as divest,” Nelson said. “It made it a little more difficult and took a little longer than we thought because we had to re-look at how we approach our investments.”
Several informational sessions were held to help society members understand the actions taken and the reasons behind them, according to Nelson. The actual divestment period took about a year and was completed in November 2018.
“I felt proud to say that we were able to work through it with good communication and making people aware of the issues involved,” Nelson said.
The global divestment movement, led by its founder Bill McKibben of 350.org, began in 2012 and has garnered 1,000 divestments from institutions and municipalities to date.
The Climate Action Group is made up of 20 church members who meet twice a month, according to Metcalf.
Another local effort called Blue Communities, spearheaded by action group member Bill Diamond, is calling on municipalities to stop using plastic bottled waters at town- or city-sponsored events.
In downtown Northampton, Metcalf said, several businesses participate in Blue Communities. Establishments such as Sam’s Pizza, Herrell’s Ice Cream and the State Street Fruit Store have blue stickers posted outside their stores to indicate that people can refill their re-usable water bottles inside for free.
“We try to do what we can locally to discourage the use of plastic as much as possible,” Metcalf said.
In recent years, the action group has participated in marches in Washington in 2014 to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, which drew over 400,000 people, as well as the People’s Climate March in New York City in the same year.
Climate change, Metcalf said, “is the most important thing we need to be focusing on right now.”
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com