POULTNEY – Mindy S. Lubber, one of the world’s most influential leaders in harnessing capitalism for positive environmental outcomes, will be Green Mountain College’s 2015 commencement speaker on Saturday, May 16.
Lubber is the president of Ceres, the leading U.S. coalition of investors and environmental leaders working to improve corporate environmental, social and governance practices. Ceres has succeeded in persuading more than 1,000 companies to sign its “Climate Declaration” urging Congress to adopt new laws to combat global warming. She also directs the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of more than 100 institutional investors representing over $10 trillion in assets.
“Ceres is doing in the corporate world what GMC has been doing in higher education for the past two decades,” said Dr. Paul Fonteyn, president of Green Mountain College. “Under Mindy’s leadership, Ceres is harnessing free market ideas to convince companies that sustainability is central to their competitiveness and bottom lines.”
Lubber holds an MBA from SUNY Buffalo and earned her law degree from Suffolk University. She joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1995 as a senior policy advisor and was named administrator of the EPA’s New England Regional Office under President Bill Clinton in 2000.
She was the founder, president and CEO of Green Century Capital Management, a family of environmentally responsible mutual funds. She also served as president of the National Environmental Law Center.
Lubber is the recipient of the Skoll Social Entrepreneur Award and under her leadership, Ceres has been awarded Global Green USA’s 2009 Organizational Design Award and Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards in 2007 and 2008. In 2010, Mindy was honored by the United Nations and the Foundation for Social Change as one of the “World’s Top Leaders of Change” for her work in mobilizing companies to integrate environmental challenges into core business strategies including PepsiCo Inc., Nike, and the Ford Motor Company.
She regularly speaks about corporate and investor sustainability issues to high-level leaders at the New York Stock Exchange, United Nations, World Economic Forum, Clinton Global Initiative, American Accounting Association, American Bar Association and more than 100 Fortune 500 firms. She is also a sustainability thought leader, regularly blogging for the Huffington Post and Forbes.
Green Mountain College is one of the first schools in the country to divest itself from publicly-traded companies which hold most of the world’s known coal, oil and gas reserves.
