CWU Business students win national corporate engagement competition

Publicly traded corporations like Starbucks often rely on investors to guide their internal decision-making and shape their ideologies to align with those of their shareholders.

This makes the development of robust shareholder engagement strategies vital in the continued evolution of the global marketplace, and provides students with an opportunity to sharpen their skills through competitions like the Student Corporate Engagement Challenge.

This year, a team from Central Washington University took home the grand prize in the undergraduate division of the annual competition, hosted by the Intentional Endowments Network. The winning team was comprised of accounting, finance and economics senior Jaap Donker and cultural and environmental resource management graduate student Betty Mittelstaedt.

The two CWU students focused on developing an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) evaluation for Starbucks, in order to propose an engagement strategy to help prevent sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the workplace.

"The ESG evaluation was the most important part of this whole project, because that's what we based our risk assessment on, which then informed our shareholder engagement strategy," Mittelstaedt said. "ESG analysis is almost always qualitative, so it can get very subjective, because a lot of times you only have the information that the company itself releases. We're very thankful to Central for providing us access to databases of ESG ratings from a variety of agencies."

Mittelstaedt and Donker are part of the CWU Council of Investor Responsibility, which Donker says helped inform their work on the project.

"We're part of a Council of Investor Responsibility, which kind of led us in the right direction when it came to understanding the ESG work," he said. "A lot of our consulted resources were our faculty mentors on that council, as well as the financial strategies we've learned in class."

Mittelstadt and Donker worked closely with faculty mentors Associate Professor of Finance and Supply Chain Management Thomas Tenerelli and Department of Economics Chair Toni Sipic, and they were paired with an industry mentor.

"Michael Passoff has been in the business a really long time, and gave us all the background information we needed to do the shareholder engagement strategy part," Mittelstaedt said. "With our combined knowledge, we were able to do the whole investment recommendation and company analysis. But our mentor helped us bring it across the finish line."

Donker credits the team's decision to focus on sexual harassment as the main reason they went on to win the Intentional Endowments Network competition.

"It's hard to talk about sexual assault in a business setting; it's still very taboo," he said. "The judges commended us on our bold decision to take this approach, and I think it paid off."

Mittelstaedt added that ESG work is becoming more prominent in shareholder engagement work, and in order to reflect this change, business classes at CWU have started incorporating more of the subject.

"Society as a whole has gained this awareness that things like climate change and child labor are very real issues that need to be addressed," she said. "This has driven a rise in ESG ratings and reports produced by companies like Starbucks. As a result, ESG work is starting to be incorporated more into our classes."