Investigate is a project of the of the Action Center for Corporate Accountability of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC).
The Action Center for Corporate Accountability - formerly known as the Economic Activism Program - aims to expose, isolate, and reduce corporate complicity in state violence. We especially focus on corporations involved in mass incarceration, immigrant detention, border militarization, Israeli apartheid, and other AFSC priority areas.
Founded in 1917, AFSC is a Quaker organization that promotes lasting peace with justice, as a practical expression of faith in action. Drawing on continuing spiritual insights and working with people of many backgrounds, we nurture the seeds of change and respect for human life that transform social relations and systems. AFSC has worked for decades in social movements against mass incarceration, the militarization of police and the border, for the rights of immigrants and formerly incarcerated people, for peace, and for the rights of people under a military occupation around the world.
AFSC has a long history of supporting non-violent campaigns through research, training, and strategy consultation. During the civil rights movement, AFSC provided logistical support to Martin Luther King and helped popularize his stance on nonviolence by publishing his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. AFSC worked closely with César Chávez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, to organize farm workers and improve working conditions and wages. In 1969, a group of AFSC staff formed NARMIC: National Action/Research on the Military Industrial Complex, to research companies profiting from the Vietnam War and publish materials for the use of the anti-war movement.
Even before AFSC's founding, Quakers were corporate accountability trailblazers, initiating the anti-slavery Free Produce Movement and instituting the first socially responsible investment screens by Friends Fiduciary Corporation in 1898.