The Stewardship Prizes

Everything that follows rests on one principle that citizens across the political spectrum already hold: what you own, you control. A share of stock is property. The vote attached to it is part of that property. For the last half century that vote has been quietly exercised on the owner's behalf, without their knowledge, by intermediaries who do not know them and who never asked what they value.

The Stewardship Prize asks no legislature for anything. It requires no fiduciary to change how it invests. It compels no one to participate. It spends no taxpayer money. It simply restores to owners a right they already hold: to vote their own shares alongside whichever trusted institution they choose. Nobody hands a vote to anyone. The institution publishes how it votes; the owner's shares vote the same way, automatically, until the owner chooses otherwise.

A conservative can recognize every load-bearing beam: property rights, voluntary association, subsidiarity, market discipline, market signals, free markets, and institutional accountability. A progressive can recognize the outcomes. Both can recognize the current arrangement, in which the votes of millions of households are either cast by strangers or not cast at all, as one of the least democratic and least market-like features of the modern economy.

In September 2015 all 193 member states of the United Nations signed the same seventeen goals for 2030. The list came up from the ground, not down from a committee: 88 national consultations, an Open Working Group of 70 countries, and an online ballot, MY World, in which more than eight million people voted on what mattered most to them. It is the closest thing humanity has to a written statement of shared values.

You can read it as a list of things almost nobody is against. Safe and sufficient food (Goal 2). Healthcare you can reach when you need it (Goal 3). Water you can trust (Goal 6). Reliable, affordable clean energy (Goal 7). Fair work, fair credit, and an end to forced labor (Goal 8). Oceans and land left better than we found them (Goals 14 and 15). Honest institutions and an end to abuse and exploitation of children (Goal 16). The partnerships that carry the rest (Goal 17).

We scored every one of the 169 UNSDG targets. For twelve of them, shareholder democracy is pivotal, meaning owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome. For another 62, it is necessary, meaning owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes. Sixteen of the seventeen UNSDG goals contain at least one UNSDG target where shareholder voting is necessary or pivotal; only education does not.

The Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland maintains the Common Ground of the American People, a catalog of policy positions that majorities on both the right and the left support in its in-depth surveys of the American public. Public will is documented by construction here, so the only question is what stands between that agreement and the outcome.

We scored all 255 positions. For fourteen of them, shareholder democracy is pivotal; for another twenty, it is necessary; and for eighteen more, it helps at the margin. The remaining 203 belong to governments, courts, and voters alone.

JUST Capital, an independent nonprofit, has surveyed nearly 200,000 Americans since 2015 on what they expect from business, and weights its 17 issues by what the public says matters most. Alone among the four, it both asks specifically about corporate behavior and ranks the issues by priority, so it shows not only what people want from companies but what they want most.

We scored all 17 issues. For thirteen of them, shareholder democracy is pivotal, including the issue Americans rank first, paying a fair, living wage. For another three, it is necessary. On only one issue, corporate philanthropy, does it merely help at the margin.

Kate Raworth's Doughnut describes the safe and just space for humanity: a social foundation below which people fall short on life's essentials, and an ecological ceiling of nine planetary boundaries beyond which we overshoot what the planet can sustain. Cities have adopted it as a planning framework, Amsterdam first in April 2020 and Brussels that September.

We scored all 21 dimensions. For four of them, shareholder democracy is pivotal, and for another twelve, it is necessary. So for sixteen of the 21 dimensions, reaching the safe and just space depends on owners voting their values. No dimension is independent of corporate conduct.

The stories below are examples of goals that clear both tests: the outcome depends on corporate behavior, and people across the political spectrum already want it. Each links to the places it shows up in the analyses.

Protecting children online. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats support the Kids Online Safety Act, a U.S. child-protection bill; only 7 percent of American voters oppose it. A bipartisan Senate investigation of Roblox opened this month, at least six U.S. state attorneys general, from both parties, have sued, and reports from the platform to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children nearly tripled in a single year, from 24,522 in 2024 to 65,381 in 2025. Roblox is owned, through their retirement plans, by the parents and teachers of those children. The company's response has included a first Washington office, a senior lobbying hire, and reported lobbying that centers on the softest available version of child-safety legislation. The bill does not stop at the company: Roblox has accrued $57 million for youth-safety settlements and faces more than 160 federal cases, and the national cost of child sexual abuse in the United States runs to roughly $9.3 billion a year, borne by families, courts, hospitals, and taxpayers. Its owners did not authorize any of that. Its owners were never asked. The only argument against letting them be asked is that owners must vote for whatever maximizes profit, whatever the cost to children. We do not believe anyone will make that argument out loud. (SDG 16.2, ending abuse and exploitation of children.)

Clean water. Ninety-six percent of American voters say protecting the safety of drinking water is important, and 70 percent of Republicans are concerned about the narrowing of U.S. federal water protections. Every rural well, every trout stream, and every municipal intake sits downstream of corporate decisions that the people drinking the water helped to finance and never voted on. (SDG 6, clean water and sanitation.)

Honest markets and accountable institutions. Restricting corporate spending in elections is among the policies that draw majority support from both Republicans and Democrats, and 83 percent of Americans say they would have more confidence investing in a corporation with transparent political spending. Today the public holds one set of interests and corporate lobbying dollars pursue another, and we accept this as the weather. In a market where companies answered to owners who vote their values, corporate political activity would drift toward the public interest by the simple logic of who signs the proxy. Nobody has to pass a campaign finance law. The owners just have to show up. (SDG 16.5 and 16.6, reducing corruption and building accountable institutions.)

Ending forced labor and trafficking. About 80 percent of American voters call human trafficking a major problem in the United States, including roughly 90 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats, and the fight against it has been carried by successive U.S. administrations of both parties for two decades. No citizen wants the companies in their portfolio to profit from slave labor abroad. Almost every shareholder does profit from it without knowing it, and they are voting for it. The Stewardship Prize builds awareness and gives people a choice. (SDG 8.7, eradicating forced labor and modern slavery.)

Just lending. In 2015 the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Baptist Convention, USA, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the PICO National Network formed Faith for Just Lending to fight payday and car-title loans carrying 300 percent APR, offered by more than 20,000 storefronts nationwide and, in the coalition's words, "resulting in families being trapped in a cycle of debt." It is hard to name a coalition that spans more of American Christianity. Its members, meanwhile, own the publicly traded lenders and the banks that finance them, through the same retirement accounts that fund their tithes. The pulpit says one thing; people unwittingly vote for another. Making it easy for people to vote alongside their pulpit will allow these faith-based coalitions to effect the change they wish to see in the world. (SDG 8.10, expanding access to fair banking and financial services; SDG 1.4, access to financial services for the poor.)

Safe food and safe products. Ninety-one percent of American voters favor requiring clearer food labeling, 87 percent support banning additives other countries have restricted on health grounds, and when asked to choose between protecting public health and lowering food prices, Democrats (57 percent), Republicans (58 percent), and independents (62 percent) all choose health. A parent's right to know what is in the food and the products they buy for their family crosses every partisan line, and shareholders have already shown they can move a food company when they hold enough of the vote. After sustained shareholder engagement led by As You Sow on pesticide residues in its cereals, Kellogg announced in early 2020 that it would phase out the pre-harvest use of glyphosate on the wheat and oats in its supply chain and work with suppliers to reduce chemicals on crops. A pesticide resolution at the successor company, Kellanova, still drew only 22 percent of the vote in 2024. Imagine that vote with the parents, the pediatricians, and the farmers' cooperatives who own the company voting alongside the organizations they trust. (SDG 2 and SDG 3, food systems and product safety.)

Energy security and capital discipline. Americans disagree sharply about climate policy; they do not disagree that the country needs reliable, affordable energy and that companies have no business gambling shareholders' capital on strategy whiplash. Between 2020 and 2025, BP pledged to cut oil and gas output by 40 percent, then reversed and cut renewable investment by roughly 70 percent under pressure from a single activist holding a five percent stake. Whatever one thinks of either strategy, the shareholders who lived through both were never consulted about either. (SDG 7, affordable and reliable energy.)

Conservation and stewardship of land and water. Hunters, anglers, ranchers, and conservationists have shared this ground since Theodore Roosevelt, and here too the proxy has already worked once. In May 2021 a majority of shareholders at Bunge, one of the world's largest agricultural commodity traders, backed a proposal from Green Century Capital Management asking the company to report "if and how it could increase the scale, pace, and rigor of its efforts to eliminate native vegetation conversion in its soy supply chain." A single small fund manager, with a fraction of a percent of the shares, carried the vote because enough other owners agreed. Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation, and the state conservation clubs have millions of members who own Bunge and its peers through the same index funds as everyone else; they have simply never been asked. (SDG 14 and SDG 15, life below water and life on land.)

Nothing in this approach requires anyone to sell a share, change a fund, or accept a lower return. Fiduciaries keep investing exactly as they do today. What changes is who casts the vote. The beneficial owner (the person whose retirement plan holds the value of shares they never directly hold) keeps their votes and casts them alongside a civil society organization they already trust. A church, a children's safety association, a veterans' organization, a conservation group, a cancer society, a teachers' union: each publishes how it votes, and any member who chooses can have their shares voted the same way, automatically, in one click, for as long as they like.

Our pilot with the Sierra Club showed that members will take up pass-through voting if the plumbing is made to be simple. It also revealed the size of the opportunity. The Sierra Club's 3.4 million members hold, through their retirement and brokerage accounts, a stake in the U.S. public equity market that we estimate at more than one percent of the whole. For comparison, the activist fund that won three of twelve board seats at ExxonMobil in 2021 held a 0.02 percent stake. If the members of the Sierra Club alone voted their shares alongside it, every candidate for every corporate board would court that vote.

Now ask the same question of everyone who owns a share: which organizations do you belong to? Behind the first door are the churches, whose voting ethics predate the corporation by centuries. The parent groups. The sportsmen's and conservation clubs. The professional associations. The patient advocates. Every one of them is a latent voting bloc, a community whose voice has never been expressed.

The prize exists to make them count.

Each prize can be named in plain, market-relevant language and may overlap several UNSDG targets, or include goals beyond the UNSDGs. Each can be shaped by the interests of the funder and by the civil society organizations we intend to inspire to mobilize the votes.

We vet candidate prizes with five tests. Leverage: every goal the prize aims at, whether a UNSDG target or an item from one of the other catalogs, scored pivotal or necessary in our analysis. We give more weight to a prize built around at least one pivotal goal, and more again to a prize that covers several goals at once, so that one coalition's votes carry all of them. Majority: the goal has documented support across the political spectrum. Coalition: we can name mass-membership organizations whose identity matches the goal and who would claim the prize as their own. Proxy: the outcome runs through public companies whose shares carry votes, and the change can be written as a specific request that a coalition can put to a shareholder vote and then check. Kitchen table: a member can say what the prize is for in one sentence. Ten candidates that pass all five:

Safe Childhood (SDG 16.2, 3.4, and 8.7, all necessary): child safety online and offline, youth mental health, and child labor out of supply chains. Claimed by parents' associations, teachers, pediatricians, and churches; the constituency that already owns Roblox, Meta, and their peers without knowing it.

Safe Food (SDG 12.4 pivotal; 2.4 and 2.2 necessary): pesticide and additive practices, honest labeling, and resilient food production, so a family can know what is in what they buy and eat. Claimed by parents, pediatricians, and farmers' cooperatives.

Clean Water (SDG 12.4 pivotal; 6.3, 6.4, and 6.6 necessary): what leaves the pipe, what the watershed absorbs, and how much is drawn, across every company whose operations touch water. Claimed by anglers, farmers, rural water districts, and municipal ratepayers.

Ocean Rescue (SDG 14.1 pivotal; 14.2 and 14.4 necessary): plastic and nutrient pollution at the corporate source, and fishing fleets that leave fisheries whole. Claimed by anglers, coastal communities, surf clubs, and aquarium members.

Forests, Fields, and Wildlife (SDG 15.2 pivotal; 15.1, 15.5, and 2.4 necessary): deforestation-free supply chains, habitat, and working lands stewarded for the long term. Claimed by hunters, ranchers, and the conservation clubs that have shared this ground since Theodore Roosevelt.

Zero Waste (SDG 12.2, 12.4, and 12.5, all pivotal; 11.6 necessary): packaging, toxics, and recycling, three pivotal UNSDG targets under one plain-language banner. Claimed by community and civic groups, and by every household that sorts its bins and wonders whether it matters.

Fair Finance for Working Families (SDG 8.10 and 10.c pivotal; 1.4 necessary): an end to predatory lending, affordable remittances, and banking access for the excluded. Claimed by the churches of Faith for Just Lending, immigrant communities, credit unions, and military family associations.

Slavery-Free Supply Chains (SDG 8.8 and 12.6 pivotal; 8.7 necessary): forced labor out of the portfolio, safe workplaces in it, and the supply-chain disclosure that makes both auditable. Claimed by churches and human-rights organizations of every stripe.

Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy (SDG 7.2, 9.4, and 13.2, all pivotal; 7.1 and 7.3 necessary): three pivotal anchors in one prize: renewable capacity, industrial retrofit, climate policy integration, and the strategic consistency owners can plan around. Claimed by ratepayer groups, farm organizations, and faith networks.

Honest Companies, Honest Markets (SDG 12.6 pivotal; 16.5, 16.6, and 16.10 necessary): transparent corporate political spending, anti-corruption, and disclosure owners can act on. Claimed by good-government organizations from both flanks, which have watched lobbying money argue against their members for decades.

Where a single organization cannot plausibly reach one percent alone, the prize is designed to be split by a coalition. We also recognize finalists and the milestones they pass along the way, so that organizations that do not win still bring votes with them and the next coalition starts from higher ground.

Eligible participants are civil society organizations, or coalitions of them, whose members have chosen to vote their shares alongside them. Winning requires demonstrating, with transparent and auditable data, that one percent of U.S. public equity voting power is under stewardship aligned with the prize's goal, and that the coalition publishes its voting recommendations and votes them consistently across the companies in which its members hold stock.

Coordination must preserve each organization's autonomy, remain open to new members, and remain nonpartisan in structure. No participant is required to endorse any ideology, policy agenda, or the SDG framework itself.

Coalitions may fail to form. Civil society organizations have never been asked to do this, and some will lack the capacity or the confidence. We address this with a shared operating playbook, peer learning across coalitions, and a deliberately low floor for initial participation.

Large organizations may crowd out small ones. Prize criteria reward pluralism and breadth of coalition, not the dominance of a single incumbent.

Platforms and custodians may drag their feet on implementing pass-through voting. Prizes reward outcomes across multiple platforms, so no single intermediary can block a coalition.

A weak representative may give weak advice. This is the economy of trust, and it corrects itself: a coalition publishes how it votes, so members can see whether the advice matches the values they joined for, and take their shares elsewhere if it does not. We expect the market for representation to be competitive, and we welcome that.

Organizations may fear political or reputational exposure. Everything in the prize design, from voluntary participation to nonpartisan structure to plain-language categories, is built to lower that exposure.

Shareholder voting is not sufficient everywhere, and we say so. Our UNSDG target-level analysis is honest about limits: on many targets, governments, households, and informal economies must act too, and on a handful (most of Goal 4, education) the shareholder lever barely reaches. The prizes are aimed where the lever is longest, and the published analysis shows every rating and its evidence, so no funder has to take our claims on faith.

A funder does not simply write a check. A funder chooses a goal, endows its prize, and creates permanent representation for that goal on every corporate board in which the coalition's members hold stock. Few things a philanthropist can buy are as durable. Grants expire. Campaigns end. Votes recur, every year, at every annual meeting, forever.

We invite funders to think about the prize the way they would think about a chair at a university, except that the chair is on the board of every company in the index.