The California Endowment Adds Investment Screen For Firearms

After its most recent board meeting, The California Endowment announced that it will add a screen for companies that produce firearms. This is TCE's third screen, adding to its decisions to screen for tobacco products and for-profit prisons:

"This past week our Board of Directors met for our quarterly meeting and we spent time discussing the tragedy of the Parkland shootings. We are a public health and community health-focused foundation, so we view policy issues from a public health and prevention perspective. Gun violence is a complex issue and defies simple, bumper-sticker solutions. So the Board’s discussion was rich, and we concluded that addressing gun violence requires multi-pronged approaches.

"We deliberated on the issue, and enacted two decisions specific to the aftermath of this event, which is already having national political and policy repercussions. The first is that our Board decided to, as policy, prohibit investments in companies that manufacture firearms. This is now the third such investment prohibition (or “screen”, in the language of investments policy) for us as a foundation; the first was with tobacco products, and the second was in the area of for-profit prisons."