The University of Illinois has over $230 million invested in companies that profit from the extraction,
transportation, or combustion of coal, petroleum, or natural gas. The possession of these assets opposes the
University's stated values of “enhanc[ing] the lives of people in Illinois, across the nation, and around the
world” and “dedicating its [the University of Illinois’] brightest minds and resources toward prioritizing the
environment.” In 2019, students voted with an overwhelming majority for the divestment of fossil fuels.
A decade into the fossil fuel divestment campaign, Students for Environmental Concerns has assessed a
knowledge deficit regarding University of Illinois investments and their negative impact on our environment as
an obstacle to remedying the ongoing climate crisis. We believe that an accessible and transparent web interface
will shrink this knowledge gap; in turn, informing the local and extra-local communities of environmental harm
done by The University of Illinois System (UIS)  investments, leading to the collective expansion of a fossil fuel divestment movement.
Furthermore, this web interface can serve as a portal for anyone interested in analyzing institutional investments
and will thus serve as a tool in providing public oversight to a historically opaque institution.
We aim to build an interactive and dynamic web interface to visualize the University of Illinois Systems’
investment portfolio, with a focus on assets invested in corporations that profit from the extraction,
transportation, or combustion of coal, petroleum, or natural gas.
The UIS publishes investment data as an appendix to its annual report, which
is the singular current source of publicly accessible UIS investment data. Ideally, these reports would be used to
create a longitudinal relational database of UIS investment, which would require intensive data refinement and
data integrity checking. Developers would also utilize publicly accessible API or web scraping techniques to
update the database with additional relevant information regarding UIS assets, including but not limited to 
participation in the profiteering from fossil fuels. A web interface would follow from this database, where users
may interact with UIS asset data, while the interface provides accessible visualizations of relevant information
pertaining to UIS assets.
Ideally, a general open-source framework would be created to generate similar databases and web interfaces that
may be extended to other institutions of interest (i.e. other public university systems may extend this platform).