SustainableBusiness.com is sad to report that Joan Bavaria, a pioneer of social investing whose vision and humanity helped catalyze change in the capital markets, passed away Tuesday evening at her home in Marblehead, MA, after a prolonged battle with cancer. Bavaria dedicated her life to exploring and developing all means of social investing and to educating and motivating other investors.
"Joan was one of my heroes, a visionary who’s done an extraordinary job at both laying out a vision for changing the world, and at making that vision become reality," said Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres. "Today we celebrate her life, rather than grieve, which is exactly what she would have wanted us to do."
Bavaria co-founded Ceres in 1989, with a mission to move companies, financial markets and policy makers to find solutions to sustainability challenges such as global climate change. Under her leadership as Board Co-Chair for the past 19 years, Ceres launched three major initiatives that continue to have global impact: the Ceres Principles, a corporate environmental code of conduct; the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the de-facto international standard for corporate sustainability reporting now used by 1,300 companies worldwide; and the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), an alliance of over 70 investors with more than $7 trillion in collective assets dedicated to addressing climate change.
"It is hard to imagine the world without Joan Bavaria," added Norman Dean, Ceres board co-chair and former executive director at Friends of the Earth. "It is even harder to imagine what the world would be like had there been no Joan Bavaria."
Read more about Joana at the link below.
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