ATCHISON, Kansas — 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.”

They invest what little they have in corporations that match their religious ideals, but they also keep a bit in some that don’t so they can push those companies to change policies they view as harmful.

This past spring and summer, when many companies gathered for annual meetings with their shareholders, the nuns proposed a string of resolutions based on stock they own, some in amounts as little as $2,000.

The sisters asked Chevron to assess its human rights policies, and for Amazon to publish its lobbying expenditures. They urged Netflix to implement a more detailed code of ethics to ensure nondiscrimination and diversity on its board. They proposed that several pharmaceutical companies reconsider patent practices that could increase drug prices.

Up until the 1990s, the nuns had few investments. That changed as they began to set aside money to care for elderly sisters as the community aged.

“We decided it was really important to do it in a responsible way,” said Sister Rose Marie Stallbaumer, who was the community’s treasurer for years. “We wanted to be sure that we weren’t just collecting money to help ourselves at the detriment of others.”

Faith-based shareholder activism is often traced to the early 1970s, when religious groups put forth resolutions for American companies to withdraw from South Africa over apartheid.

In 2004, the Mount St. Scholastica sisters joined the Benedictine Coalition for Responsible Investment, an umbrella group run by Sister Susan Mika, a nun based at a Texas monastery who has been working in the field since the 1980s.

The Benedictine Coalition works closely with the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility, which acts as a clearinghouse for shareholder resolutions, coordinating with faith-based groups — including dozens of Catholic orders — to leverage assets and file on social justice-oriented topics.

The Benedictines have played a key role at ICCR for years, said Tim Smith, a senior policy adviser for the center. It can be discouraging work, where the needle only moves slightly each year, but the sisters “have the endurance of long-distance runners.”

The resolutions rarely pass, and even if they do, they’re usually nonbinding. But they’re still an educational tool and a means to raise awareness inside a corporation. The nuns have watched over the years as support for some resolutions has gone from low single digits to 30% or even a majority.

“We don’t give up,” Mika said. “We just keep persevering and raising the issues.”