As You Sow

As You Sow is an El Cerrito, California-based nonprofit that uses shareholder power to promote environmental and social corporate responsibility. Founded in 1992, it describes its mission as advancing a safe, just, and sustainable world in which environmental health and human rights are central to corporate decision-making. The organization works entirely through leverage rather than protest: by aggregating investor votes and filing resolutions at corporate annual meetings, it creates binding public accountability moments that legislative and litigation strategies alone cannot easily replicate. Its AI-related work entered through the climate lens — pressing the largest AI developers to reconcile their exploding data center energy demands with publicly stated net-zero commitments.

Founding and structure

As You Sow was incorporated in 1992. Conrad MacKerron — now the organization's Senior Vice President — built out the shareholder advocacy program that defines its operating model. Chief Executive Andrew Behar, previously a documentary filmmaker and clean-tech entrepreneur, has led the organization for over a decade; Danielle Fugere serves as President and Chief Counsel, providing the legal infrastructure for proxy campaigns. The organization employs approximately 24 staff across program areas including Climate and Energy, Circular Economy, Environmental Health, and Social Justice. Funders include the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations; the Park Foundation separately grants for energy-sector shareholder work.

AI and climate accountability

As You Sow's engagement with artificial intelligence is organized around a single strategic frame: major AI companies have made public climate commitments — net-zero targets, renewable energy pledges — that their mushrooming data center buildout now materially threatens. Between January 2023 and January 2025, proposed gas-fired power plant capacity in the United States rose nearly 70 percent, to almost 200 gigawatts, with a significant fraction directly tied to data center demand. As You Sow and the Sierra Club documented this trajectory in the Compute and Consequence report (2025), which also proposed a framework for investors, technology companies, and utilities to align clean energy development with grid decarbonization.

The resolution campaign operationalizes that analysis. As You Sow has filed shareholder resolutions asking Meta (2024, 2025), Microsoft (2024, 2025), Amazon (2025), and Alphabet (2025) to report on how each company will meet its climate commitments given AI energy growth. The Microsoft 2024 resolution took a sharper angle: it asked for a risk assessment of providing AI tools to the oil and gas industry, noting that Microsoft controls nearly 60 percent of all cloud services contracts with the oil and gas sector — the argument being that AI infrastructure is the enabling layer for continued fossil fuel production. The Microsoft board recommended voting against; the resolution did not pass. Complementary resolutions filed at Dominion Energy and Southern Company addressed stranded-asset and residential-ratepayer cost risks arising from data-center-driven fossil infrastructure.

In May 2026, As You Sow co-filed resolutions at Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet alongside the Presbyterian Church (USA), Mercy Investments, and Trillium Asset Management, asking companies to ensure that skyrocketing data center electricity use is compatible with their climate commitments. The coalition framing matters: by organizing across faith investors, community investors, and mainstream ESG funds, As You Sow assembles a multi-constituency bloc that a company's board cannot easily classify as niche or ideological.

Broader portfolio

The AI accountability work sits inside a portfolio that has operated for over three decades across environmental and social issues. As You Sow publishes Racial Justice and Workplace Equity Scorecards covering the 3,000 largest publicly traded U.S. companies, tracking 64 key performance indicators on diversity, equity, and inclusion. It also runs plastics, biodiversity, and environmental health programs using the same shareholder-resolution infrastructure. The AI thread is the organization's newest area of engagement; the governance muscle — the filing machinery, investor coalition relationships, proxy-season calendar discipline — is fully established.