Connecting the Dots between Climate Destruction and its Financial Backers

By Eve Gutman | –

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Standing on a mobile stage in a suburban Philadelphia park on July 3, Ugandan human rights activist Hillary Taylor poured a cup of dirt into a clay vase. “This soil represents all my communities in Uganda and Tanzania,” he said to a crowd of 300 people gathered near the global headquarters of Vanguard, the world’s largest fossil fuel investor. 

This was the start of a major day of action for Vanguard S.O.S. — the international campaign that’s calling for the powerful asset manager to deal with its climate change problem and invest in a livable future. Participants came from near and far to dramatize the connection between asset managers like Vanguard and the harm their investments cause frontline communities.

As an outspoken advocate with StopEACOP, the campaign fighting the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, Taylor was one of several people representing communities on the frontlines of dangerous pipelines and toxic incinerators built and run by companies financed by Vanguard. Another was Denali Nalamalapu, co-director of Protect of Our Water, Heritage, Rights in western Virginia, who told the crowd, “I came here today bringing the energy of folks in Appalachia who have been fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline for the past 10 years. When we march up to Vanguard, we will be carrying with us the righteous rage of all the people endangered by this pipeline.”

Nalamapalu, like Taylor, had brought soil from their land and added it to the clay vase. A week later, a smaller group attempted to deliver the vase to Vanguard incoming CEO Salim Ramji, along with a large welcome card signed by hundreds of people, but the gifts weren’t accepted by Vanguard security at the entrance to its campus.

After rallying and hearing from speakers like Nalamapalu and Taylor, the crowd marched to the entrance of Vanguard’s campus, sat in its driveway and held a Quaker meeting for worship. The silent crowd of hundreds of people blocking the road made for an unusual sight in an office park, but one filled with the growing power of a determined movement. As we marched back to the park, singing, plans for more actions were already forming.  

Connecting the dots

More and more people are getting involved in climate finance campaigns and talking about following the money from fossil fuels back to their investors, funders and insurers. The climate movement is increasingly taking on financial institutions like asset managers, which have few publicly-accessible branches and are far removed from the immediate impacts of their investments. Making the connection between fossil fuel sites and the distant corporate headquarters from which they’re being financed and insured may be a challenge — but it’s also an opportunity. It begs for activists to get creative with our strategy, try out new tactics, and forge and nurture relationships across distance and differences. 

As part of the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign, my organization — Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT (where I serve as the media and research coordinator) — holds regular direct actions at Vanguard’s headquarters in Pennsylvania. We’ve also been joining actions organized by groups resisting Vanguard investments in other places and have trained people around the country to hold their own actions targeting Vanguard. EQAT and the organizations we work with in the campaign are testing out models for how to connect the dots between the largest investors/funders of fossil fuels and their real life impacts — and learning lessons in the process.

Vanguard invests $413 billion of its customers’ money in coal, oil and gas, making it the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels. As a bondholder, Vanguard uses its customers’ money to finance the construction of new oil and gas pipelines at a time when science tells us with resounding clarity that — in order to have a safe and healthy future — we cannot extract and burn more fossil fuels. As a stockholder, Vanguard gets to vote at the annual corporate meetings of major polluters like Exxon and Chevron. However, Vanguard actively votes against sustainable action at companies in its portfolio. It does all this despite publicly acknowledging that climate change is a risk to investors.

Because Vanguard has so far failed to take meaningful action on climate change, a network of groups in North America, Europe and Australia have built the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. We are straightforward with our demands that Vanguard: 

1. use its power and influence as a shareholder to push the companies it invests in to do better on climate change, 

2. exit its investments in fossil fuel companies that refuse to transition their businesses to be in alignment with no more than a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature rise and 

3. offer climate-responsible funds as mainstream products. 

For over three years, we have held dozens of protests, made hundreds of phone calls, sent thousands of letters and moved tens of millions of dollars out of Vanguard, with more to come.

“Follow the Money,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

As EQAT prepared to join the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign in 2021, we turned to points of intervention and story-based strategy to focus how we were going to build power and leverage that power to pressure Vanguard. In their influential book “Re:Imagining Change,” Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning wrote about points of intervention, or “specific places in a system where a targeted action can effectively interrupt the functioning of the system and open up opportunities for change.”

There are points of destruction, where resources are extracted or injustice enacted; points of production, where goods are produced; points of consumption, where goods are bought or used; points of decision, where decision-makers make decisions about destruction, production and consumption; and points of assumption, where narrative and belief about the issue is developed and shaped. When campaigners get clear about what these points are in our specific campaigns, we can make strategic choices about where to take action in order to apply the most pressure.

EQAT decided to begin by coupling actions at corporate headquarters — the point of decision — with actions at polluting facilities that are Vanguard investments: points of destruction. That meant that some of our first protests in the campaign were at local oil-fired power generating stations owned by Exelon and trash incinerators owned by Covanta — both Vanguard investments. When we did take action at Vanguard’s headquarters, we did so with a concrete understanding of the impacts caused by corporate decisions, and we were able to tell a clearer and more compelling story about the connection between them. 

Since then, EQAT has returned to one of those Covanta trash incinerators during key moments of the campaign to hold actions in collaboration with Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living, or CRCQL. It’s thanks to that group’s 30-plus years of experience pushing back against the incinerator — and holding events that educate about the impacts on the climate and community — that EQAT keeps coming back for actions. 

Forging relationships across distances and differences

The impacts of Vanguard’s investments reach far beyond trash incineration and power generation in the Philadelphia region. As the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign has grown, there have been more opportunities to connect the dots between Vanguard’s investment choices and real harm in people’s lives — between the point of decision and points of destruction. 

In late 2022, a delegation of leaders from Achuar and Wampís Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and fishing communities on the Peruvian coast traveled to Pennsylvania, requesting to meet with Vanguard about its financial support of an oil company threatening their communities. When Vanguard ignored their request to meet, EQAT worked with Amazon Watch to turn out over 100 people to accompany the delegation and protest Vanguard’s disregard of human rights and Indigenous sovereignty.

This past winter, EQAT joined with StopEACOP campaigners on the digital action app chilli and helped hundreds of people contact Vanguard about its investments in TotalEnergies, the company behind the destructive African pipeline. chilli is a platform that connects its thousands of users with quick daily digital actions, like emailing the executives of the corporations financing fossil fuel projects.

I worked with its team to create a video explaining the connection between Vanguard and EACOP, and they set up a “mission” in the app where hundreds of people participated in nine digital actions targeting Vanguard between January and March. Collaborating on the digital actions was outside EQAT’s usual focus on in-person direct action, but we knew it was an important act of relationship building to show up for partners (who would later show up at the large action at Vanguard in July).

This spring, we worked with groups in Appalachia to take action at Vanguard’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina. It coincided with a big march through downtown Charlotte that visited Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo — calling out all of these investors and funders of the dangerous Mountain Valley Pipeline. While in North Carolina, EQAT organizers spent time in living rooms, backyards and Quaker meeting houses, singing, sharing food and telling stories of wins and losses. With that visit, we planted seeds of connection whose effects were apparent by the big action at Vanguard that summer.

We also signed on as a supporter of Summer of Heat on Wall Street in New York City, a season of sustained nonviolent civil disobedience against the financiers of fossil fuels. EQAT members took part in their actions at Citibank headquarters — which launched the season of action — as well as interfaith actions where leaders of many faiths came together to demand Citi do better. A busload of Summer of Heat participants joined us at the Vanguard action, tying together our work there and their work on Wall Street.  

Actions like those in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New York and online were only possible thanks to relationships — and those relationships developed thanks to the international network of groups that is the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign. Participating in this campaign network has allowed member groups to make connections across differences, forge relationships built on common cause and work together to take action that tells the story of why Vanguard needs to change. The actions were a product of the relationship building that had already been going on behind the scenes and, in turn, were an opportunity to strengthen those relationships and keep working together.  

The entire campaign network stands to gain so much when groups taking action at the points of decision collaborate with groups taking action at the points of destruction. Being able to uplift stories of the frontline impacts of Vanguard’s investments at its corporate headquarters — as well as getting to be present at events organized by frontline communities — has undoubtedly strengthened the campaigning that EQAT does. 

Back at Vanguard, Virginia-based singer, educator and organizer, BJ Lark, spoke to the crowd. Lark and her organization, CommUNITY ARTSreach, have been involved in opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a project of two Vanguard portfolio companies. As she explained, “I grew up Gullah Geechee. Some of my wisest ancestors said: We did not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we are borrowing it from our children. It is not yours to destroy.”

Cutting off the flow of money to fossil fuel expansion and redirecting financial support away from fossil fuel corporations dead set on sticking with the status quo are vitally important. The stakes of inaction are enormous, but so are the possibilities of the better world we can win with collective action and solidarity. Forging relationships across distances and differences doesn’t just happen; it takes work, consistency and thoughtfulness. But when we can show up for each other and show how working together benefits each others’ campaigns, connecting the dots between points of decision and points of destruction can bring so much to the work of groups in both places. 

As Vanguard S.O.S. takes action in new places this fall, campaigners will be applying lessons learned and learning new ones in the process. It’s all in service of winning the changes that bring us ever closer to having clean air to breathe, clean water to drink and a safe climate in which to thrive.

Eve Gutman is the Media and Research Coordinator at Earth Quaker Action Team, which is a member of the Vanguard S.O.S. campaign.

Via Waging Nonviolence