Activist nuns take on corporate America through stock market investments
In the quiet town of Atchison, Kansas, an unlikely group of activists is taking on some of America's biggest corporations -- not through protests on the streets, but through the stock market.
Sister Barbara McCracken is an experienced activist, who has even been arrested at immigration protests.
"We went into the office of our state attorney because of his rulings that we didn't care for regarding immigrants that we felt were unfair and unjust," McCracken told ABC News.
She now leads a different kind of revolution from her tranquil monastery an hour outside Kansas City.
Today, McCracken and her fellow nuns at Benedictine Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica say they have transformed into savvy investors, using their shareholder status to advocate for corporate change at tech giants and Fortune 500 companies.
The strategy is straightforward: invest at least $2,000 in a company's stock to gain shareholder rights, then submit resolutions pushing for corporate responsibility.
"We look at companies with child labor issues, employment policies, and how they treat their employees," Sister Rose-Marie Stallbaumer explained. "Their benefit packages, the wages, and whether the CEO gets a huge amount of the profits rather than sharing it with workers – for me, it's the human element."
The initiative serves a dual purpose. While the monastery relies primarily on private donations and fundraising, these stock investments help secure the sisters' retirement, as they receive no financial support from the Catholic Church.
"The Catholic Church does not support the community," McCracken clarified. "The community's always worked and supported ourselves. All religious orders do that, contrary to what some of the general public might believe."
In the past year alone, the sisters have submitted more than a dozen shareholder resolutions, including pushing Alphabet (Google's parent company) to adopt stricter AI development rules, urging Chevron to establish an independent human rights monitoring commission, and calling on Amazon and Verizon to implement more transparent lobbying practices.
The companies declined ABC News' requests for comment. While none of the resolutions passed, the sisters remain undeterred.
"Over the years, it's begun to make a difference," Stallbaumer said. "Some of these companies begin to want input from the group on what their human rights policies should look like. It takes a long time. That's one of the blessings of religious communities – we're in this for the long haul."
