Episode
Sustainability In Your Ear: Shareholder Democracy and Causeway Impact Founders on Building Shareholder Influence
- Podcast
- Sustainability In Your Ear
- Published
- Jun 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3670
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Summary
If you hold a 401(k), an IRA, or a single index fund, you own a sliver of hundreds of American companies, yet you almost certainly let someone else decide how those shares vote. Individual investors hold about 25% of all U.S. public equities , more than BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street combined, yet only about one in eight of them votes the shares they own ; the rest of those ballots get cast by a handful of asset managers and the proxy advisory firms they rely on, deciding who sits on corporate boards, how executives are paid, and what a company owes its workers, its customers, and the climate. This week’s two guests want to put that voice back in owners’ hands. Gabriel Grant , co-founder of the nonprofit Shareholder Democracy , is building the machinery to let everyday investors delegate their proxy votes to a civil-society organization they already trust, such as a labor union, a faith community, an environmental group, choosing a representative once and changing it whenever they want. Doug Heske , CEO of Newday Impact Investing and its Causeway platform, comes at the same problem from the engagement side, channeling revenue from values-aligned portfolios into work with more than 50 mission-aligned nonprofit partners and connecting investors and donors to the causes — and companies — they care about. Grant is building the rights layer that gets a vote counted; Doug is building the engagement layer that turns it into a continuing conversation with management. Their conversation brings the challenge into focus. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, learn how the proxy vote problem undercuts foundations whose endowments quietly vote against the shareholder proposals their own grantees are writing — one side of the house funds the change while the other vo…