SUPPORTING STATEMENT: Nike is a leading athletic footwear and apparel company. That is its core business, and it owes a duty to shareholders to maximize the value of their investments by focusing on that core purpose and staying away from unrelated concerns, especially if they're partisan, extreme or otherwise fraught with easily avoidable risk.

Nike has partnerships with and contributes to many organizations that promote highly divisive agendas such as providing minors with secret-from-parents access to puberty blockers and gender transition surgeries, evangelizing radical gender ideology to minors, and lobbying to allow males to destroy girls' and women's chances to excel in their own sports and to violate their privacy and safety1 in restrooms and locker rooms.

Proponents of radical gender ideology claim that children are sexually mature enough to make Iife-choices of permanent consequence, such as taking puberty blockers and undergoing gender transition surgeries. However, most people (and therefore most ultimate Nike investors – not the investment houses and proxy advisory services stealing their voices) don't.2 This contentious and vast disagreement between radical gender ideologues and the public has nothing to do with Nike making and selling footwear and apparel. Yet, Nike has paid partnerships with the Human Rights Campaign3 and the GenderCool Project4 – organizations that promote these divisive practices.5

Nike also has partnerships with Athlete Ally6 and The Out Foundation7 – organizations that, along with HRC and GenderCool, lobby for males competing in girls' and women's sports8 despite the fact that 70% of Americans oppose it.9

The burden of proof is on the Board to explain why these particularly divisive and unordinary uses of shareholder resources are deemed to be congruent with its fiduciary duty.

Recent events have made clear that shareholder value drops when companies engage in overtly divisive activism of this sort. Following Bud Light's embrace of such partisanship, its revenue fell $395 million in North America compared to a year prior.10 Target's market cap fell over $15 billion amid backlash for similar actions.11 Disney stock fell 44 percent in 2022 – its worst performance in nearly 50 years – for putting divisive agendas ahead of parental rights.12 And more recently, Planet Fitness' valuation dropped by $400 million in just five days after the company banned a female member for expressing her discomfort with a male shaving next to her in the women's locker room.13

Considering that Nike gives shareholder assets to many organizations that advance the very agenda that caused Disney, Target, Bud Light and Planet Fitness valuations to plummet, such contributions pose a clear risk to Nike shareholders as well.