How a Small California City Kicked War Criminals to the Curb
Albany now boasts one of the nation’s most progressive ethical investment policies.
Paid subscribers make my reporting possible. Consider joining them:
One Bay Area city is blazing a trail that local organizers hope others will follow with new and comprehensive ethical investment policies.
“It’s a small city that has an appetite for making a difference,” said Preston Jordan, a member of Albany City Council and its Audit and Fiscal Sustainability Standing Committee, who championed the new policies. “So there’s ingredients, there’s context here that make it possible for Albany to be a leader.”
Albany is home to about 20,000 people. Many are members of Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine, a grassroots organizing group launched in the winter of 2023 that also includes residents of neighboring El Cerrito.
For more than a year now, between regular demonstrations, film screenings, and fundraising events to support organizations leading on-the-ground relief efforts in Palestine, the group has been working with local lawmakers to amend the city’s investment policies. Its aim is to ensure that city funds are not invested in companies implicated in human rights violations, war crimes, or other harms.
The effort grew out of an earlier campaign to mobilize the Albany City Council to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The council voted 4-0 to adopt that resolution in March 2024.
“By the end, we were filling the room, and 90 percent of the people contributing were all for the ceasefire,” recalled Barry Preisler, an Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine member. “The city council and city officials got to hear us and realize how important it was to so many people, so that laid the groundwork for moving forward more easily on divestment.”
Members of Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine, including Barry and his wife, Haiganoush Preisler, committed to organizing around an ethical investment resolution soon after and took the idea to then-mayor Aaron Tiedemann. “When it was brought to me as a council member, I thought it was the right thing to do,” Tiedemann recalled. “As a small city, we can’t always have a huge impact on the big issues, but we can control where our money is invested and make sure that’s consistent with our values.”
Tiedemman lost his reelection bid in November 2024, but nonetheless introduced the idea of working with Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine to amend Albany’s investment policies at his last council meeting. When the council reconvened in 2025, Jordan carried the project forward.
Developing new policies required a series of meetings between local organizers, lawmakers on Albany City Council’s Audit and Fiscal Sustainability Standing Committee, the city’s treasurer, and its investment manager. That manager works for the firm hired to manage Albany’s portfolio, and he offered advice on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment approaches, which have become increasingly common since the UN began encouraging the model for socially responsible investing in 2004.
“The investment manager for Albany came to meeting after meeting and presented, ‘Here’s different ways the implementation could work,’ so we didn’t have to invent this from scratch,” said Jordan. “We made some substantial adjustments, but we had professional advice giving us a menu of starting points.”
Ultimately, the Albany City Council voted to pass new ethical investment policies in two parts. First, it adopted an ESG investment policy and a separate implementation plan in September 2025. That plan outlines the ESG factors that the city’s portfolio manager must consider when investing the city’s funds. For example, it directs the manager not to invest in the aerospace and defense, firearms and ammunition, and oil and gas industries, as well as in any companies rated high-risk for harm.
Because those directions are outlined in a standalone implementation plan that is referenced in the city’s investment policy, rather than in the policy itself, the criteria are easier to amend regularly. The city’s overarching investment policy is reviewed only once per year.
The first change to that implementation plan came soon after it was adopted, when, in November 2025, the city council voted to add a values statement to strengthen its human rights standards. Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine organizers advocated for the change because, under standard ESG models, some companies accused of human rights violations can still slip through the cracks.
“We kept coming back to Caterpillar as an example of where this all falls apart,” said Peter Bernhardt, an Albany and El Cerrito for Palestine organizer who worked on the new policies. Caterpillar sells machinery to Israel, which weaponizes it against Palestinians in military operations and home demolitions.
But Caterpillar was not flagged using the ESG investment criteria Albany first adopted in September. That’s because the company did not fall into any of Albany’s proscribed industries and common tools that portfolio managers use to determine ESG risk, like Morningstar’s Sustainalytics, have begun to exclude certain conflict zones from their determinations altogether.
Morningstar announced that it would no longer consider “issues pertaining to [the] Israeli-Palestinian conflict area” in December 2024, following demands from pro-Israel groups who claimed Morningstar was biased against Israel. The company had already made decisions to stop using UN Human Rights Council data and the terms “Occupied Palestinian Territory” and “occupied territory.”
“There’s a huge hole in their ratings,” said Jordan. “Therefore, we need a backstop of having this language in the policy so that Albany itself has the latitude to exclude specific companies based on findings that they are likely involved in these behaviors.”
Alongside Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin was identified as the only other company in Albany’s portfolio that did not align with its new investment policies. Barry said that because the targeted companies represented only a tiny portion of the city’s portfolio, organizers did not “face an argument that this is going to have a significant financial impact.” Instead, he said, “We could focus on the moral and the ethical questions.”
The city no longer holds investments in Caterpillar or Lockheed Martin and is precluded from making similar investments in the future.
While the specifics of Albany’s portfolio may have given organizers a leg up, they believe other strategies that made their campaign a success could be replicated anywhere. For starters, they recommend building relationships with lawmakers.
“We invited the council members to come and talk with us, and we did that with the ceasefire campaign, too, personally, one-on-one,” said Haiganoush. “We were able to get them to look at the facts themselves.”
“I think that made the biggest difference in actually moving things forward,” agreed Bernhardt. “Because once you, with respect, engage with them to try and educate them on a topic they have not necessarily paid close attention to, you stand a better chance of success. Then, having numbers show up at city council meetings to talk is just icing on the cake.”
Jordan said he also recommends organizers be willing to make compromises during the legislative process, not on their moral or ethical demands but on finding the best path toward meeting them. He said that for Albany organizers, the plan to pass the city’s new investment policies in two parts, with the human rights-related commitments coming second, “was understandably a bit uncomfortable.”
But, based on council members’ expertise and the relationships the groups had fostered, they were able to move forward rather than reach an impasse. “That took trust,” Jordan said.
It also resulted in a more comprehensive policy that accounts not only for human rights violations, but other harms both at home and abroad, including gun violence and the pollution wrought by the oil and gas industry. Albany now boasts one of the most progressive ethical investment commitments among cities nationwide.
The organizers who demanded the change and their allies in the city government hope Albany’s process and policies will serve as models. Tiedemann said: “I think that a lot of other cities can do this if you just approach it calmly and go with the intent of doing the right thing.”
John Loeppky edited this story.
Marianne Dhenin
Marianne Dhenin
Marianne Dhenin