Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) is a New York-based coalition of faith-based and values-aligned institutional investors that pioneered shareholder engagement as a corporate-accountability tool more than fifty years ago. Its over 300 member institutions — religious orders, dioceses, faith-based pension funds, healthcare foundations, labor unions, university endowments, and NGOs — collectively represent more than $4 trillion in managed assets and deploy that capital standing to file shareholder resolutions, conduct corporate dialogues, and assemble co-filer coalitions demanding that companies address social and environmental harms, including the harms of AI development and deployment. ICCR is the primary institutional channel through which faith-community capital is organized as an AI accountability lever.

Founding and structure

ICCR was established in 1971 when founding faith congregations decided their financial stake in major corporations could be used as a lever for social change. The organization's first campaign targeted South Africa's apartheid system: the Episcopal Church filed the first religious-sponsored shareholder resolution with General Motors, asking the company to stop doing business in South Africa until apartheid was abolished. ICCR built on that founding act through the 1970s and 1980s to coordinate a broader divestment and shareholder-pressure campaign across US-domiciled companies with South African operations — one of the early proofs that institutional-investor standing could be organized as a social-change mechanism on a global human rights file.

The organization is headquartered at 475 Riverside Drive in New York — the Interchurch Center — a building historically shared by mainline Protestant and interfaith bodies. Its membership structure is tiered: faith-based members hold governing-board eligibility and determine ICCR's priority issue areas; associate and affiliate members include secular asset managers, labor unions, and NGOs that share its values-aligned investment mission. The Governing Board, elected by and from the faith-based membership, sets the agenda. CEO Josh Zinner has led the organization since January 2016, with Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster serving as Executive Vice President.

ICCR has published an annual Proxy Resolutions and Voting Guide since 1974 — a comprehensive catalogue of member-sponsored shareholder proposals issued each proxy season to educate investors and build co-filer support. In the 2024 proxy season ICCR members filed 344 resolutions and secured 85 withdrawal agreements, the form of outcome that represents a corporate commitment to engagement or policy change prior to a vote. In the 2025 proxy season the numbers were 347 resolutions and 66 withdrawal agreements.

Shareholder engagement model

ICCR's operating method converts a coalition's collective institutional-investor standing into a structured engagement channel with corporate management. Member institutions file shareholder proposals under SEC Rule 14a-8, gaining an item on the company's proxy ballot and requiring a management response. When corporate dialogue yields a satisfactory commitment, the filer withdraws the resolution before the vote; when it does not, the proposal goes to a shareholder vote and the result enters the public record and the company's reputational calculus. ICCR coordinates co-filer recruitment — assembling coalitions of member institutions and allied investors behind the same resolution to raise its visible support and its threat credibility — and publishes the annual Proxy Guide to build consensus across the institutional-investor community that makes the mechanism politically operative.

The campaign model compounds across years: a resolution filed in one season and withdrawn against a corporate commitment creates an auditable accountability record; companies that later fail to honour the commitment face re-filing and the reputational cost of a voting record. ICCR tracks these multi-year engagements across its seven issue portfolios — Digital Rights and AI Accountability, Advancing Worker Justice, Climate Change and Environmental Justice, Equitable Global Supply Chains, Health Equity, Corporate Political Responsibility, and Investor Responsibility — as the core mechanism of what it calls "catalysing corporate change."

Digital Rights and AI Accountability

ICCR maintains a dedicated Digital Rights and AI Accountability program area. The AI accountability work runs through two channels: direct shareholder resolutions at individual companies calling for AI transparency reports and human rights due diligence disclosures, and coordinated engagement conducted through ICCR's co-leadership of the Investor Alliance for Human Rights' information-and-communication-technology engagement track, which targets the largest global technology companies on digital rights performance across AI and platform deployments.

Shareholder resolutions under this program have requested that companies including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple publish reports assessing how their AI systems are developed, deployed, and audited for human rights risks. The 2024 proxy season saw ICCR introduce an AI Transparency Report as a new shareholder ask — requesting companies disclose ethical guidelines and governance processes around AI technology. In the 2025 proxy season, ICCR members co-filed a resolution alongside 59 shareholders collectively representing over $80 million in Microsoft shares, asking the company to assess whether its AI and cloud technologies were being used by military and other customers to commit human rights abuses or violations of international humanitarian law. The resolution was one of the most specific human-rights-due-diligence asks targeting a frontier AI and cloud provider in the proxy record, demonstrating the extent to which ICCR has built the capital-leverage approach into an AI accountability instrument.

Beyond the resolution mechanism, ICCR publishes investor briefings and sector guidance on digital technology's impacts on workers and communities. A 2024 brief co-published with Open MIC — "Dehumanization, Discrimination and Deskilling: The Impact of Digital Tech on Low-Wage Workers" — analysed how algorithmic management, platform surveillance, and AI-driven deskilling harm low-wage workers, providing organizing infrastructure for member institutions approaching these engagements. ICCR's AI accountability portfolio situates the organization as the primary movement-side actor deploying institutional-investor capital standing — rather than litigation, legislation, or direct action — on the AI accountability register, operating in a venue where large asset owners have rights that other civil-society actors do not.