Ceres (organization)


Ceres is a non-profit sustainability advocacy organization based in Boston, Massachusetts and founded in 1989.
In 2007, Ceres was named one of the 100 most influential players in corporate governance by Directorship magazine. Ceres was a recipient of the Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2006, as well as a recipient of the Fast Company Social Capitalist Awards in 2008. As of May 2017, its president is Mindy Lubber.

History

Ceres was founded in 1989 when Joan Bavaria, then-president of Trillium Asset Management, formed an alliance with leading environmentalists with the goal of changing corporate environmental practices. She named the organization the "Coalition for Environmentally Responsible EconomieS", or CERES. Ceres was the ancient Roman goddess of fertility and agriculture.
That same year, following the Exxon Valdez oil spill, CERES announced the creation of the Valdez Principles, a ten-point code of corporate environmental conduct to be publicly endorsed by Ceres companies.
In 1993, following lengthy negotiations, Sunoco became the first Fortune 500 company to endorse the Ceres Principles. Since then, over 50 companies have endorsed the Ceres Principles, including 13 Fortune 500 companies that have adopted their own equivalent environmental principles.
In 2003, the organization rebranded itself as "Ceres"
On January 27, 2016 Ceres and the United Nations Foundation convened the seventh Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the United Nations in New York, attended by more than 110 institutional investors who collectively represented more than $22 trillion in assets, with a goal of doubling global investment in clean energy by 2020.

Ceres principles

First published in the fall of 1989, the Ceres Principles are a ten-point code of corporate environmental ideals to be publicly endorsed by companies as an environmental mission statement or ethic. The 10 Ceres Principles are: