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About ProxyDemocracy

ProxyDemocracy provides a set of tools to help investors use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own.

It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan project supported by foundations that are themselves interested in being responsible investors.

What others are saying

  • "I just about stood up and cheered when I saw this site. My hope is that investors who are trying to make up their mind between one fund and another will use this."
    Nell Minow, co-founder of The Corporate Library
  • "ProxyDemocracy is the long-awaited resource that brings the tools of shareowner engagement, available before only to deep-pocketed institutions, to the citizen investor’s computer screen. That produces a double dividend. We are now one important step closer to making corporate boards truly accountable to owners. And grassroots investors have potent means to protect and grow their hard-earned savings."
    Stephen Davis, Project Director, Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance; co-author, The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

Mission

ProxyDemocracy aims to make proxy voting a more effective way of holding public corporations accountable to their shareholders and to society. We believe that society benefits when investors use their voting power, and we are building tools designed to make it much easier for them to do so.

Who we are

ProxyDemocracy, Inc is a nonprofit organization and is a fiscally sponsored project of RSF Social Finance. It is directed by Andy Eggers, a doctoral student in Government at Harvard University, and website development is split between Andy and Anandaroop Roy, a web developer and designer based in New York City.

ProxyDemocracy is supported by funding from the Panta Rhea Foundation, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the General Service Foundation, and RSF Social Finance.

ProxyDemocracy's board of directors brings together experience with both shareholder engagement and web-based activism:

  • Mark Orlowski is the Executive Director and Founder of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a special project fund of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors dedicated to advancing sustainability in campus operations and endowment practices. Mark has filed shareholder resolutions as a member of the board of managers overseeing investments for New England Quaker Meetings.
  • Nicco Mele is the co-founder of EchoDitto, a web development company with offices in Washington, DC, and New York City. Nicco was Howard Dean's presidential campaign webmaster.
  • Mark Latham is the director of VoterMedia.org, which promotes good governance in democracies and corporations through new models of information gathering. Mark has filed shareholder resolutions at numerous companies promoting his proposed governance reforms. His published ideas were the initial inspiration for ProxyDemocracy.