Recent graduates Sparsh Sharma and Jerrod Rabenbauer won the Intentional Endowments Network’s 2024 Student Corporate Engagement Challenge on May 14. 

The competition, open to both undergraduates and graduates, requires student teams to pitch an investment in a publicly traded company with a shareholder engagement strategy included, focusing on issues such as climate change, social equity, racial justice and sustainability. 

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“It’s vitally important to the world to use finance as a key lever to achieving sustainability,” said Sharma, who majored in economics. “It supports economic growth while reducing pressures on the environment or social considerations like human rights [and] human capital investment.” 

Over the course of five months, the 13 teams participating this year submitted a proposed investment for feedback, followed by an investment recommendation, a proposed shareholder engagement strategy and a recorded oral presentation. 

After considering a utility company, a clean technology company and a waste management company, Sharma and Rabenbauer settled on the waste management sector. Aiming to find an investment that was both realistic and impactful, they narrowed their stock options by looking at financial metrics, ratings, and environmental, social and governance metrics, considering factors like the price to earnings ratio. The two ultimately decided to focus their project on employee safety.

“It’s clear that the industry needs to reform a little bit. Priorities need to change,” Sharma said. “I’m looking to marry together that ethical responsibility with that desire to have meaningful change.”

Sharma said teamwork and open communication were the key to the team’s success, which also provided him numerous networking opportunities and hands-on experience in his chosen career path. 

Anu Rames, the founder and managing principal of Sustainable Investment Partners LLC and Sharma and Rabenbauer’s mentor for the duration of the competition, said she thought that the team’s thoroughness and emphasis on finding a plan that was actionable and impactful contributed to their victory. 

“They chose to work on an issue where the impact was on a lot of people, and it was an employee thing, the changes that they were asking for,” Rames said. “It was something that the company likely needs to do to be a better corporate citizen. It’s something that’s impactful on the bottom line, and it’s something that already has momentum building behind it.”

Sharma said Rames provided insight into what people were looking for in stocks within the sustainable engagement process, which he and Rabenbauer did not have as much experience in.

“Sustainability is a really interesting space, because on one hand, it goes against the grain on what’s out there right now,” Rames said. “[But] you see a lot of the old guard retiring. If you need this conversation to keep going forward, you need to have young students getting interested in it, get involved in it and come into the workforce looking to engage with these types of issues.”

Bella Alvarez, the organizer of the competition, said the challenge intends to provide students with the resources to gain experiential learning at the intersection of sustainability and finance by providing access to mentors working in the field and consistent project feedback from judges, along with industry workshops.

While reviewing projects, the judges focused on finding an engagement strategy that prioritized open communication, was reasonable for the company they were engaging with and was not too heavy of a lift on the endowment.

“[Sharma and Rabenbauer] showed that they had a really great handle on the company that they chose to invest in, and that they really understood what its core issues were, whether those were ESG issues and challenges that could come up, but also just on the valuation of the company and how sustainable its business model was,” Alvarez said. “Their engagement strategy was very actionable.”

She encouraged students who were interested in participating to reach out to them and to view the competition as a learning opportunity to take on at any point in their academic journey.

“[Sharma and Rabenbauer] were incredibly engaged throughout the entire process,” Alvarez said. “They were really interested in networking. They were really interested in improving their deliverables. They really integrated and welcomed feedback from the judges and from the mentors. Keeping that engagement with me, with the rest of our team, with the mentors, with the judges throughout the entire process showed how passionate they were, and I think that came through in their deliverables.”

Disclaimer: Sparsh Sharma formerly served as a finance beat writer at the Daily Trojan until December 2023. He is no longer affiliated with the organization.