A Children’s Activist Fund: How We Can Let Our Children Have Influence And Power In The Stock Market That Is Creating Their Future

Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images

Young people are increasingly able to voice their opinions as consumers. But there is one place where their voices are unheard – the stock market. What if there was a way?

Here’s a depressing statistic that I found recently, buried deep in a Wunderman Thompson report on the attitudes of children towards retail.

67% of 6- to 9-year-olds say that saving the planet will be the central mission of their careers in the future. (Wunderman Thompson Commerce)

These are children who are the same age as my seven-year-old son Nuri and they are already realizing that their job will be to clean up after us? Imagine the incredible psychological burden of feeling like they must be the ones who rescue this planet from complete systemic collapse.

For too long, our children have been left out of a financial system that is slowly and relentlessly shaping the world that they will inherit. Despite the best efforts of decades of lobbying, Wall Street and major financial institutions, driven by their myopic focus on short-term profits has helped create a world of climate collapse and massive income inequality.

If the Gamestop/AMC episode taught us anything it is that a group of determined and organized retail investors can go up against the establishment – and win.

It has been encouraging to see the rise of activist investor platforms like Engine No 1’s Transform 500 ETF (which gives retail investors a stake in the top 500 US stocks to influence change) and Tulipshare’s platform (which allows individual investors to sign-up for specific action aimed at Apple, Amazon and Coca-Cola).

But I believe we must go further: I propose the creation of a Children’s Activist Fund which for the first time allows the younger generations a voice: a chance to represent themselves and their needs in a volatile and uncertain world.

I will be the first to admit I have no idea as to how this is legally possible: parents may need to be guardians of their children’s shares, in much the same way as it pertains to their savings accounts or mutual funds.

I also have no idea how to build the technology that allows millions of children a chance to register their views and shape them into consensus-driven initiatives which can be then influence the policy-decisions of major corporations.

I will leave these things to people who are far more legally, financially and technologically proficient.

But what I do know is the optics: imagine a child walking up to the microphone at an Annual Shareholder meeting, representing the Children’s Activist Fund, tabling a motion that the company needs to take swift and evasive action to become carbon-neutral in a five-year-window? Or that it needs to commit to racial and gender-equality from the board-level down within a similar time-frame?

Now imagine that image on the TV evening news – and imagine being the banks, pension and endowment funds, and private equity companies who have to publicly vote against that child? And being the executives who must go back home to have dinner with their own kids, who asked them why they voted against their future?

This may seem like a naïve pipe-dream. But if we want to build a world where seven-year-olds don’t have to worry about having to be the ones to rescue the world from collapse, maybe it isn’t such a radical idea after all.

And if doing so, creates a better corporate environment for them to eventually become employees in, then that’s an added bonus.

It’s a future I’m willing to invest in. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.