By Colin Craig, MBA, CSRIC®

If you have been following our blog posts or if you have interacted with Beacon Wealth Consultants as a client, chances are that you have heard us use the term stewardship.  And for good reason!  Stewardship is a central tenant of all we do at Beacon Wealth.

According to the late pastor-theologian R.C. Sproul, stewardship can be defined as “exercising our God-given dominion over His creation, reflecting the image of our creator God in His care, responsibility, maintenance, protection, and beautification of His creation.”¹  And while creation certainly includes the physical earth that we all find ourselves on, it is not limited to that. Rather, creation includes people made in the image of God (see Genesis 1:27).

At Beacon Wealth Consultants, we strive to steward the assets entrusted to us with great care as fiduciaries, with the goal of blessing others through the careful selection and monitoring of investments that we make on our clients’ behalf.  Let’s take a quick look at how this plays out in our approach to faith-based investing, focusing specifically on a recently launched initiative at our company.

Beacon Wealth’s Avoid-Embrace-Engage Framework

At Beacon Wealth Consultants, we evaluate portfolio investments through a three-pillar stewardship framework: Avoid, Embrace, and Engage.  These three categories provide a roadmap for values-based investment decisions in light of our fiduciary responsibility to our clients.

• Avoid – At the heart of our exclusionary investment policy is Christ-centered love for others. We seek to glorify God by avoiding investments in companies whose products and services are harmful to people. We apply exclusionary screens based on a company’s business practices and/or products and services, which tend to be concrete and measurable.
• Embrace – We strive to direct our investment dollars toward more honorable companies that are meeting real needs in the world today. These companies, which we like to call Shining Light Companies, are companies that meet real needs in ethical ways with good products and services. Shining Light Companies tend to demonstrate strong servant leadership. They live out the golden rule in their business practices. They seek to take care of creation, demonstrate strong corporate governance, and create compelling value through the products and services that they offer. In other words, there’s a lot more to these companies than just increasing the bottom line.
• Engage – While some firms in the faith-based space also apply exclusionary screens to areas of concern such as company behaviors (e.g., corporate grants to Planned Parenthood), we do not take this approach. We believe that behaviors can be positively impacted through engagement with corporate leadership, and we actively seek to do so through our proxy voting platform (the topic of our next section).  If we were to divest from these companies, we would lose our “voice” to enact change.

Amplifying Your Voice Through Proxy Voting and Shareholder Engagement

One of the privileges of being an American citizen is the right to vote in a democracy.  As we vote at the polls, we are – even if just in a small way – contributing to the national, state, or local political conversation.  And when like-minded voters coalesce together around certain business or socioeconomic issues, their collective voice is even more powerful than they would otherwise be as individual voters.

While voting at the polls for our next elected representatives is important, there are other forms of voting that are often overlooked – yet still worth exploring.  For example, stockholders (i.e. partial company owners) can express their voices by voting on key issues presented on the ballot of each company’s annual shareholder meeting.

If an investor owns enough of a particular stock for a certain time period, they can even file a shareholder proposal requesting action from the company and/or its board of directors on certain issues.² Furthermore, shareholders can speak to companies directly, encouraging them to take certain actions or promote vital change.

As a faith-based investment firm, we hold the importance of proxy voting and shareholder engagement in high regard, seeing them as an opportunity to help our clients steward God’s resources well, while remaining faithful to our role as fiduciaries. That’s why, earlier this year, we launched a new initiative at our company: proxy voting and shareholder engagement in our clients’ stock holdings within our actively managed Select Equity model portfolios.  We are excited about this new initiative and see it as an important extension of our faith-based investing stewardship efforts.

What’s the Significance?

This might all sound interesting, but why is proxy voting and shareholder engagement important for faith-based investors?  We believe there are at least two key reasons:

1. Capital = Influence

Decades ago, faith-driven investors helped ignite the shareholder engagement movement by filing a proposal in 1971 requesting General Motors (and eventually other firms) to stop doing business with South Africa due to human rights abuses occurring under the apartheid system in that country.³ This historic shareholder proposal set in motion a multi-year anti-apartheid campaign, demonstrating that with capital comes the opportunity to have influence.

But we know this intuitively too, right?  If you pay attention to the financial media, chances are you have heard journalists heap praises on the “Magnificent 7” stocks that have had an outsized influence on US market returns in recent years. Similarly, you may have heard reports on monopolistic concerns in the mega-cap tech space.  Or, some commentators have voiced concerns over the sheer size and influence of some of the world’s biggest asset managers and proxy voting advisory firms.  In each of these cases, it is assumed that capital has influence.

As faith-based investors, we believe that we can have influence by prudently allocating capital and engaging with portfolio companies as the need arises. Shareholder engagement is an opportunity for investors to express their deeply held beliefs while encouraging companies to conduct business with excellence.

2. Promoting good business

If you are a small business owner, chances are that you are keenly aware of the importance of making wise financial, legal, strategic, and compensation decisions.  Similarly, through proxy voting and corporate engagement, shareholders cast their votes on a plethora of important business-related items, which could ultimately impact on the long-term profitability and sustainability of the investment.  Issues such as data/risk disclosures, board elections, executive compensation, auditor ratification, and many other governance, social, or environmental-related topics may appear on the ballot.

With such a broad array of potentially important topics to be voted on, we believe there is value added in hiring a proxy advisor (someone who researches and votes on proxy issues on your behalf), which is the core of our new initiative.

2025 Areas of Focus for Engagement

Specializing in research-backed proxy voting recommendations and engagement efforts from a Judeo-Christian moral framework, our proxy advisory partner, IWP Capital⁴, is focusing on several key areas in 2025 including:

1. Engagement with pharmacies and health providers regarding the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs.
2. Engaging with leading technology companies to advocate for stricter parental controls, transparency, and accountability in safeguarding children online.
3. Advocating for equal financial access and the avoidance of viewpoint-based account closures considering recent concerns over religious debanking and financial discrimination.
4. Engaging with major food companies with a focus on food additives and preservatives, advocating for safer food offerings for American families.

We are excited to extend our stewardship influence and efforts by engaging companies around these important topics.

Whether you are a current client or if you are just interested in learning more about our new proxy voting and shareholder engagement program, we welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with you about our new initiative.  If you are a current client, feel free to reach out to your wealth advisor.  And if you are new to Beacon Wealth, please connect with our team today!

Colin Craig, MBA, CSRIC® is a Portfolio Analyst at Beacon Wealth Consultants where he serves as a member of the investment management team.

References

1. https://learn.ligonier.org/articles/what-biblical-stewardship
2. https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/rule-14a-8.pdf
3. https://www.iccr.org/mission-history/
4. https://www.iwpcapital.com/proxyvoting