By Erin Kelly

The Huksy Energy Action Team (HEAT) and genocide-awareness student group NUSTAND have teamed up to explore new options to ignite change. These changes have come after Northeastern officials deemed divesting from companies linked to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan impossible, said Sunish Oturkar, founder and past president of NUSTAND.

One of NUSTAND’s original initiatives was to push for the university to withdraw investments from companies that have relations with Sudan. NUSTAND’s website states that taking out investments from these companies lowers share prices and causes the company to either pull out of Sudan or pressure the Sudanese government to stop the genocide.

After research, Oturkar said, he realized it was not so simple.

“I started to look into exactly how our endowments are invested at Northeastern and discovered that it is such that divestment from Sudan without a major recall of how we invest is not really possible,” he said.

The Northeastern corporation does not make direct investments; instead it gives large sums of money to investment groups to invest as they see fit, said Sy Sternberg, the new chairman of Northeastern’s Board of Trustees in a recent interview with The News. Sternberg confirmed that, as a consequence, divesting from Sudan is difficult.

“I think that’s the way it is,” he said. “I hate to say that