Nuns in rural Kansas vex big companies with their investment activism

Among corporate America’s most persistent shareholder activists are 80 nuns in a monastery outside Kansas City.

Nestled amid rolling farmland, the Benedictine sisters of Mount St. Scholastica have taken on the likes of Google, Target and Citigroup — calling on major companies to do everything from AI oversight to measuring pesticides to respecting the rights of Indigenous people.

“Some of these companies, they just really hate us,” said Sister Barbara McCracken, who leads the nuns’ corporate responsibility program. “Because we’re small, we’re just like a little fly in the ointment trying to irritate them.”