Biography
Caroline Rees
President and CEO, Shift
Caroline Rees is President and Co-Founder of Shift, a non-profit organization with the mission to build a world in which business gets done with respect for people’s dignity and equality. Caroline oversees the organization’s strategy and thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing respect for human rights in business practices. In recent years, she has focused on corporate reporting as a catalyst for better human rights risk management, and on improving the data and methods used to evaluate companies’ social performance as part of ESG (environmental, social and governance) analysis. She has written and spoken extensively on the relevance of business respect for human rights to movements that seek to advance sustainability, equality, ESG investing, stakeholder capitalism, and human and social capital.
Caroline previously spent 14 years with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From 2003 to 2006 she led the UK’s human rights negotiating team at the United Nations and chaired the negotiations to establish the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights. After Kofi Annan appointed Professor John Ruggie to that role, Caroline moved to work with John as lead advisor, and was centrally involved in the drafting of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which the UN endorsed in 2011. From 2009 to 2011 Caroline was also Director of the Governance and Accountability Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Corporate Responsibility Initiative, and she remains a Senior Program Fellow there. Caroline is a Commissioner on the [Business Commission to Tackle Inequality,](https://tacklinginequality.org/ “”) a member of the [Advisory Committee to the Investor Alliance on Human Rights](https://investorsforhumanrights.org/advisory-committee “”), the Advisory Group to the Workforce Disclosure Initiative, the Global Council of the ESG Exchange, and the Advisory Panel of the Capitals Coalition.
