I figured out I could go to the SEC Edgar database boolean search page and use this search string:  State=WA and type=D.  There were also a few under State=WA and type=D/A.  (form D amended)

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar?text=State%3DWA+and+type%3DD&first=2012&last=2012

You can click through each company, and click their document and you’ll find out who the officers are, what their contact info is, how much they are raising and how much they have raised.  Neat stuff if you didn’t already know it.

After a little more digging on EDGAR, I found a page with more help on formulating searches.  It gives the tip that you can narrow by industry using SIC codes, but since those codes are ancient it’s of limited utility. I tried to guesstimate what kind of search I might set up as a member of the Northwest Energy Angels, but after some head scratching I found a study on renewable energy companies by the Wa State Department of Commerce where the researchers concluded “Based on discussion with several energy researchers, we determined that using SIC codes for most sectors was not a feasible analytic approach, given their lack of specificity regarding many energy efficient and renewable energy technologies. Additionally, the two state agency databases we used to obtain employment and revenue data classified companies by four-digit, rather than six-digit, SIC codes, which are insufficient to distinguish most categories of energy efficiency and renewable energy companies. “  So so much for that.

For a scraped and formatted version you can check out FormDs   http://www.formds.com/locales/seattle

I think Brian’s post (and Mark’s video) neatly capture the problem of the shallow nature of business. Brian also has a clear articulation of how it is a system that can produce negative results despite being comprised of mostly well intentioned people.  I see a parallel in social justice organizing: people know how to organize marches and demonstrations and we’re imitating the form of the great work of the ’60s, but we’re not generating the same success because we’re only copying the visible parts, we’re missing the less visible ways those parts connected to deeper purpose.

In business we know how to get more efficient and focus on the bottom line but in our specialization with those trees we’ve lost sight of the forest -the why of it.  The video is totally about that but I think can leave viewers at the wrong answer: stay a fisherman.  I think the right answer is fisherman needs to partner with a sustainable MBA like Brian or me to say: I can help you grow your business not to build a private empire but to generate broad wealth in your community;  grow your business so you don’t just provide employment for yourself but some of your neighbors too.  Further I’ll create a workplace that invests in learning healthy conflict resolution skills and project management so when you come home from work you’re a better neighbor too, you’re enhanced not drained. That’s why the  fisherman should grow his business.  MBA skills are merely Means that accidentally have become Ends.

The site creators seem to work pretty hard to leave the tax status at the risk of the project creator – the site uses the terms “promise” and “reward”.   Most of the projects are raising a couple thousand dollars or less, so this seems to be flying on the “nobody complains, nobody gets hurt” theory. The way it makes sense to me is as a pre-sale of product or experience, but the artist/project person would need to be paying sales taxes.  The closest the site comes to a suggestion of that’s how it should be viewed is in their FAQ, if the person is unable to complete their project as listed… “If you fundamentally change your project, are unable to fulfill the promises made to backers, or decide to abandon the project for any reason, you are expected to cancel funding. A failure to do so could result in damage to your reputation or even legal action on behalf of your backers.”    Your backers, IE your customers, could take you to small claims court.  But who is going to do that for $25?  If you’re pledging more, hopefully it’s because you know the person.   On the couple projects I browsed it looked that way, an organized way to raise money from your friends and family.   The FAQ suggests backers “use your internet street smarts”.

People do this kind of thing informally all the time – help each other out, support friends doing a cool project, it’s the informal economy.  So it’s interesting to watch us use the web to formalize it.  On one had it’s improved – more transparency and a little more accountability – the projects are set up that backers make a pledge and the funds are charged and transferred only if the funding target is hit.  It’s pretty loose though – it’ s up to the project funder to post a budget or not, and they’ll let projects “overfund” if they can within the originally allotted time.  I find that a little disconcerting – it encourages people to under-budget so the can effectively break escrow, but then keep fundraising.   Project creators post updates about their projects and can choose to make them visible only to backers.  Some of the rewards are fun – tickets to an opening, or in two projects the creator offers to make dinner for backers at that level!  The opportunity to make new connections seems like a great one.  At least one place on the site used the word “patronage”.   However the downside of formalizing the informal economy is it creates sticky questions around things like tax status and regulations – to some extent these things are done informally because they’re just too small to bear the overhead of compliance.  Often taxes formally exempt projects below a certain amount, but it’s very local jurisdictional.

We looked at a couple projects that seemed like products effectively fundraising via pre-sale.  That seems really cool because you can effectively demonstrate market demand before you manufacture the product.  The question remains, can you follow through?  That’s where it gets tricky. For a $5000 project it’s probably not the end of the world. For $500,000 projects maybe there’s a way to pair this mechanism with something more formal that could do deeper due diligence on the team and the project.

very cool, check it out!

For starters, I don’t think a venture model can apply to the kind of labor and capital-intensive businesses that I think will create the kind of jobs I want to support, so I’m looking for players that are willing to take concessionary returns in return for social returns.  Such players quite reasonably will want some measurement of those social returns, as do I.  That field is nascent but evolving, I’m hopeful about what I might learn this year at SoCap.

As a COMPLETE aside, I notice that there is a quote from Andy that appears differently online than it does in the paper.   Apparently the PSBJ digital crowd is less vocabulary sensitive than the paper crowd

Sister Judy started her presentation with some background: ICCR was founded in 1971 and began by asking General Motors to divest from South Africa.  That eventually grew into the larger divestment movement, which Bishop Tutu cites as one of the five reasons apartheid finally ended.  Today ICCR has 275 institutional investor members. Members must be faith-based, though there are Associate members  who are not faith-based and who collaborate with ICCR in filing resolutions and dialoguing with corporations, and affiliate members like As You Sow.  NWCRI was founded in 1994 as a  program of the Intercommunity Peace & Justice Center. It was headed by Bruce Herbert for its first  four  years.

NWCRI members meet  3 times/year. The annual meeting  of ICCR is in June is where they review the past proxy season (runs about April-June, when most US companies have their corporate annual meetings) and talk about the issues they’re working on and want to continue working on.  In the fall they’ll file resolutions with companies.  Companies can accept the resolutions or appeal to the SEC to omit the resolutions.  Often times the filing of the resolutions will open a dialog with the company about the issue which may lead the filer to withdraw the resolution.  If the SEC lets the resolution stand, it will appear on the proxy ballot at the next company meeting.

An example –  A  resolution was filed asking  asking  Goldman Sachs to issue a report comparing the compensation of senior executives to the median employee wage at the company.  The resolution was co-sponsored by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Benedictine Sisters  of Mt. Angel, Oregon .  Goldman challenged the resolution on a technicality, saying it contained misleading statements.  The very day Sister Judy came to speak to us, the SEC ruled in favor of putting it on the ballot. If you’re a Goldman shareholder, look for it on this year’s proxy ballot.

To file a shareholder proposal, a shareholder must have held at least $2000 worth of stock for at least one year.  Multiple shareholders can co-sponsor a resolution to meet the threshold.  Once presented, if the proposal earns at least 3% of the vote it can be presented again the next year. The 2^nd year it needs to earn 6% of the vote, and the 3^rd year and every year thereafter if the proposal gains at least 10% of the shareholder votes, it can continue to be submitted to the ballot.   When a shareholder proposal wins a majority of the vote… nothing has to happen. Shareholder resolutions are advice to the company and are non-binding.  However, a significant majority can certainly send a message.

Sister Judy recommended a book called The New Capitalists as a good study of the movement.  She herself worked on the 2002 proposal to GE that it report on its greenhouse gas emissions, and was gratified to read in the book that after the resolution got the support of 23% of shareholders, GE was spurred to take a closer look which eventually resulted in the 2005 rollout of Ecomagination!

Sister Judy made a point that was particularly interesting to me- that the religious orders through their ministry work have sisters on the ground in developing countries with first-hand experience of the issues they’re trying to address.  That experience informs their shareholder work and gives it authenticity.  She gave an example of sisters working in Africa and having first hand knowledge of the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS.  That lead to the order filing a resolution with Gilead Sciences asking for a report on how the epidemic impacted their business and how they were going to address it.  The resolution got 30% of the vote two years running before the company decided to open a dialog.  That dialog resulted in the development of a leading AIDS drug, licensing to 3^rd world countries via Indian manufacturers and working on drug access issues for developing countries.

Faith Based orders are working on many issues with companies: water footprints, pollution, child labor in cocoa harvests.  A helpful aspect of working on an array of issues is that companies prefer to negotiate with faith-based organizations because there’s a wider palatte of issues to dialogue about – if a company can’t discuss one issue, perhaps they’ll discuss another. As opposed to single-issue non-profits which have a more targeted goal when engaging with a company and thus less room for dialog.

How can you get involved?  If you own stock directly, you can look for proxy ballots in the mail these next couple months.  It will be a form with a chance to vote for the members of the board of directors, confirm the selection of auditor, and possibly have a few other issues to decide.  You will see the management recommendation and can choose to vote with, against or abstain.  One strategy is to abstain on directors if you don’t know, to give other shareholder votes more weight. Folks at SRI-HH mentioned Proxy Democracy as a good resource for individual investors to see how institutions are voting.  One interesting aspect of proxy voting – it occurs over a period of multiple weeks and the company sees the votes as they come in. Further, the company can lobby shareholders to change their votes!  I learned about this when reading about HP’s much-contested acquisition of Compaq.  At any rate, the advantage to the small investor is that you can sometimes see how larger investors voted while there’s still time to imitate.

For mutual funds, most likely they just vote the proxies for you.  By SEC rule they have to disclose to you how they are voting, you can choose a mutual fund and contact them for a report.  You could apply pressure by writing and asking them to support various resolutions.  The As You Sow Foundation, which promotes corporate accountability, will post a guide to this years proxy season on April 6^th,, here.  Their website is a good source of general information.

See if you can vote one issue this year!

In reading the statue I see described the precise behaviors that I have observed,  my spouse and co-workers from the Terminal Sales Building have observed, and that need to stop.

This does NOT include folks standing with signs at corners, this does NOT include folks performing with a container out.  This absolutely does NOT include Real Change vendors who in my experience are universally respectful (with few exceptions, and the one I know who snarls also stays put.)  I am specifically concerned about the people who are authoritatively intervening with folks who are parking or trying to pay for parking – at some level impersonating parking attendants.  I am specifically concerned about people who don’t take no for an answer but follow folks like my brother-in-law the length of a block continuing to aggressively shout, call him names and demand more of a response.

I consider myself a social justice supporter and I am definitely wary of moves to sweep the poor out of view without addressing the larger social issues that bring them to our streets – but to me this is different: the folks who are hustling my would-be neighbors at payboxes are organized.  After long thought I have concluded that it is reasonable to say that I am supportive of another person’s right to linger and ask me for money only to the extent that they are supportive of my right to pass by and say no.   This is no longer the current situation downtown and it’s irrational and unacceptable to allow continued deterioration.  I believe this legislation appropriately distinguishes aggressive solicitation and will help.