Ceres Announces Leading Sustainability Advocates, Legal Experts as New Board Members
(3BL Media / theCSRfeed) Boston - June 22, 2011 - Ceres today announced it has added four new members to its Board of Directors: Carl Pope, chairman of the Sierra Club; Janet Ranganathan, vice president for Science and Research at the World Resources Institute (WRI); Peter Rosenblum, chair of the Business Department and partner at Foley Hoag LLP; and Damon A. Silvers, director of Policy and Special Counsel at the AFL-CIO.
Ceres is a Boston-based non-profit group that leads a national coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change and water scarcity. Since its inception in 1989, Ceres has achieved dramatic results, including persuading the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue formal guidance on climate change-related disclosure that companies must provide to investors in their financial filings, and releasing The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability, a vision and practical roadmap for integrating sustainability into the DNA of business.
“We are delighted to welcome these outstanding leaders to Ceres,” said Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres. “With their diverse backgrounds and unique areas of expertise, each of them brings enormous resources and opportunity to help move Ceres’ agenda forward in building a sustainable economy.” For more than 30 years, Carl Pope has been with the San Francisco-based Sierra Club in a variety of roles, including executive director and currently as chairman. Under his leadership, the Sierra Club has helped to protect nearly 10 million acres of wilderness, including in the California Desert and Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument; advanced a clean energy future by challenging the building of more than 125 proposed new coal-fired power plants; and achieved a 40 percent improvement in the pollution and fuel efficiency of America's passenger vehicles. Pope currently serves as the chairman of the board of America Votes and is a member of the boards of American Rights at Work and the Blue-Green Alliance. The Sierra Club has been represented on the Ceres Board since Ceres’ founding in 1989. Janet Ranganathan is a key member of the leadership team at the Washington, DC-based environmental think tank World Resources Institute (WRI), overseeing all research and publications. Before becoming vice president, Ranganathan directed WRI’s People and Ecosystem Program to reverse ecosystem degradation and ensure their capacity to meet human needs. She also served in WRI’s Market & Enterprise and Climate & Energy Programs. Ranganathan developed and directed WRI’s U.S. Climate Policy Initiative, which advanced policies and business actions that resulted in significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions, and founded and directed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, the international accounting and reporting standard for business and numerous national and state GHG programs. Ranganathan served on the steering committee for the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which Ceres founded in 1997.Peter Rosenblum joins the Ceres Board having spent his career counseling a broad range of Foley Hoag LLP’s clients in diverse industries concerning business and regulatory matters, financing strategies and structuring of corporate transactions. Based in Boston, Rosenblum provides comprehensive representation to companies and non-profits in technology, energy, life sciences, investment management, consulting and other industries concerning corporate governance, financings, management compensation and succession and liquidity events. Rosenblum and Foley Hoag LLP have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in pro-bono legal services to NGOs in Boston, including Ceres.
Damon A. Silvers is the director of Policy and Special Council for the Washington, DC-based AFL-CIO. With Silvers’ guidance, the AFL-CIO joined Ceres’ Investor-Business Roundtable for a Sustainable Economy, an initiative launched last month at the 2011 Ceres Conference to promote and encourage sustainable business practices. AFL-CIO pledged to work in partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, Taft-Hartley, public pension funds and private investors to create new financing mechanisms to boost investment and job creation in commercial building retrofits for energy efficiency and clean energy.
In addition to serving the AFL-CIO, Silvers was appointed jointly by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to act as deputy chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), a program of the U.S. government to purchase assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector. Silvers is also a member of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee as well as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Standing Advisory Group and Investor Advisory Group. Prior to working for the AFL-CIO, Silvers was a law clerk at the Delaware Court of Chancery for Chancellor William T. Allen and Vice-Chancellor Bernard Balick.About Ceres
Ceres leads a national coalition of investors, environmental groups and other public interest organizations working with companies to address sustainability challenges such as global climate change and water scarcity. For more information, visit www.ceres.org.
