The Investor Suffrage Movement has already implemented a rudimentary (spreadsheet based) proxy exchange and has conducting trials that had volunteers granting proxies to other individuals through that rudimentary exchange. Volunteers have attended shareholder meetings as proxies, and we want to start them submitting shareholder proposals.

Over the next few years, Field Agents will facilitate an expansion of our rudimentary proxy exchange. The most practical benefits of this for the investor community will be:

Field agents who own shares will contribute the proxy rights to the proxy exchange, which will make those proxy rights available to shareholder activists.

Field agents who live near shareholder meetings will volunteer to submit shareholder proposals and present them at those meetings.

Here is how this will work:

1. Field Agent A owns shares in several corporations. She contacts her broker to obtain documentation of ownership. She forwards the documentation to the proxy exchange along with a notarized letter granting the exchange her proxy for one year.

2. The proxy exchange aggregates information on all the proxies it receives and makes this available to shareholder activists. It also indicates in what localities it has field agents available to attend shareholder meetings.

3. A shareholder activist wants to submit a shareholder proposal at a particular corporation. He confirms that the proxy exchange has a proxy for that corporation and a local field agent: Field Agent B.

4. Working with the shareholder activist, Field Agent B submits the proposal and goes on to present it at the shareholder meeting.

While our purpose is to facilitate all reasonable shareholder proposals, if a field agent strongly objects to a particular shareholder proposal, of course, she can decline to submit it. Similarly, a field agent who grants proxy rights to the proxy exchange can request to be informed of any proposals to be submitted with his proxy rights. If he strongly objects to a particular proposal, he can decline to have his proxy used for that purpose.

Serving as a field agent will not require a significant time commitment. We will ask all field agents to try to submit one proposal and attend one shareholder meeting a year. Needless to say, many field agents will choose to do more than this.

There will be other ways field agents contribute. We will ask each field agent to try to recruit two new field agents a year. Also, as we work on the long-term goal of implementing a automated Global Proxy Exchange that is fully integrated into the financial services industry, there will be numerous organizations we will need to reach out to—non-profits, unions, brokers, mutual funds, professional associations, regulators, news outlets, proxy advisory services, etc. As the ranks of our field agents grow, the connections we have at these organizations through field agents will multiply. We will formalize a mechanism (database and website driven) for communicating with field agents about the organizations we want to approach, and getting field agents with contacts at those organizations involved.

To be a really useful tool, our team of field agents will have to number several thousand individuals. Our goal is to have a few hundred by September 2009 and at least a thousand by September 2010.

Funding