ICCR
The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) is a coalition of more than 300 faith- and values-based institutional investors representing over $4 trillion in assets. For half a century it has used the rights of shareholders β resolutions, dialogue, and the proxy ballot β to push corporations toward accountability.
What It Is
ICCR was founded in 1971, when the lawyer Paul Neuhauser wrote a shareholder proposal for General Motors on behalf of the Episcopal Church, calling on the company to withdraw from apartheid South Africa. That was the template: people who owned a piece of a company using that ownership to demand it answer for its conduct. In the 1980s ICCR was central to the corporate-disinvestment campaign against apartheid, and it has since carried that method into climate, human rights, governance, and healthcare.
Its members β faith communities, asset managers, pension funds, unions, and foundations β file roughly 300 shareholder resolutions a year at hundreds of U.S. corporations. The premise is simple and old: a shareholder has the right to ask the company what it is doing, and the company is supposed to answer.
Why It Carries Weight
ICCR is not a fringe pressure group. Its members are long-term institutional investors with a financial stake in the companies they engage β which is exactly what makes their questions hard to dismiss as activism. When ICCR investors ask a corporation to disclose a risk, they are asking as owners protecting the value of their own holdings. Fifty years of shareholder advocacy, from apartheid to the present, has made it one of the most established voices in corporate-accountability work.
Why AbilityForge Cites It
ICCR is the coalition behind the shareholder effort to make UnitedHealthUnited HealthcareThe largest health insurer in the United States by revenue. UnitedHealth Group operates two primary business segments: UnitedHealthcare (health insurance) and Optum (pharmacy careβ¦ Group disclose what its acquisition and vertical-integration strategy has done to patients. One of its members β the Congregation des SΕurs des Saints Noms de JΓ©sus et de Marie β became the lead filer of that proposal and, in March 2026, the plaintiff in a federal lawsuit to force it onto UnitedHealth's proxy after the company moved to bury it. It is the documented demand, from inside the company's own ownership, for the count no one has produced.
See "The Count No One Will Make" βSources: ICCR (iccr.org), organizational description from its own public materials and its March 20, 2026 press release on the UnitedHealth lawsuit; founding history per ICCR's published origin story.