November 16, 2020
1:15PM—2:30PM ET
Margaret “Peggy” M. Foran, Chief Governance Officer, SVP, and Corporate Secretary, Prudential Financial, Inc.
Veena Ramani, Senior Program Director, Capital Market Systems, Ceres
Christopher Rowe, Managing Director, Investments, Church Pension Group
The Rev. Kirsten Spalding, Senior Program Director, Investor Network, Ceres
Replay the November 16, 2020 event (viewing time 01:13:33)
Learn more about CPG's socially responsible investing approach.
The Reverend Canon Anne Mallonee is Executive Vice President and Chief Ecclesiastical Officer for CPG. She serves as an ambassador for CPG and is a key advisor to the organization. She joined CPG in 2014.
Immediately prior to joining CPG, she served as Vicar of Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City for ten years. Ordained for over 30 years, her ministry has been at the diocesan level and in campus, parish, and cathedral settings.
She holds a BA from the University of Kansas and an MDiv from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University.
Mary Kate Wold serves as Chief Executive Officer and President of the Church Pension Group (CPG), a $17 billion financial services enterprise that provides retirement, health, life insurance, property and casualty insurance, and other products and services to The Episcopal Church. She also serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of The Church Pension Fund, CPG’s governing body.
She has served in a variety of leadership positions in the corporate, legal, and government sectors. Prior to joining CPG, she was a senior finance executive and principal corporate officer of Wyeth, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Before embarking on her corporate career, she was a partner and chaired the tax practice group of Shearman & Sterling, a leading global law firm. Earlier in her career, she served in the Office of Tax Policy of the United States Department of the Treasury.
Her board participation has included both not-for-profit and for-profit organizations. She sits on the board of the Church Benefits Association, a national association of faith-based benefits organizations, and on the steering committee of the Church Alliance, a benefits policy and advocacy group. From 2016 until 2023 she served on the vestry of Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City and on its investment committee, which oversees the institution’s multi-billion-dollar real estate and securities portfolio. She also sits on the boards of Nucleus RadioPharma, The Jackson Laboratory, and Burke Neurological Institute. Her professional affiliations include membership in the Women’s Forum of New York and Women Corporate Directors.
Mary Kate spent her childhood in Bottineau, North Dakota, a small rural community on the Canadian border. She graduated from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, summa cum laude with a BA in English and Theater and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She later graduated cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. She holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University.
Peggy Foran is chief governance officer, senior vice president, and corporate secretary of Prudential Financial, Inc. Her role at Prudential also includes oversight of the company’s Shareholder Services and Sustainability divisions.
She has been a corporate governance leader throughout her career at Sara Lee Corporation, Pfizer, Inc., and J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc. She is a director on the board of Orion Group Holdings, Inc. and serves on its compensation and nominating and corporate governance committees. From December 2010 through May 2020, she served on the board of directors of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation. During her board tenure, Peggy served as chairperson of its Sustainability and Shareholder Engagement Committee, Compensation Committee, and Governance Committee. She previously served on the board of directors of the MONY Group and MONY Life Insurance Company.
Her proactive shareholder outreach and thought leadership on key governance issues has earned her global recognition as a leader in corporate governance. She has been recognized as one of the Most Influential People in Corporate Governance by Directorship Magazine for five consecutive years. In 2011, she was identified by Treasury and Risk magazine as one of the Most Influential People in Finance. In 2013, Corporate Secretary magazine named her “Governance Professional of the Year.” In 2015, she received both the Linda Quinn Lifetime Achievement Award from TheCorporateCounsel.net and Corporate Secretary magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
She currently serves as an active member of many influential advisory boards, with roles including co-chair of the board of directors of the Council of Institutional Investors and liaison to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Diversity and its corporate law committee. She is a member of the board of trustees of the American College of Governance Counsel; Catalyst’s advisory board; the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance’s advisory board; NACD’s Nominating and Governance Committee Chair Advisory Council; the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) stakeholders’ advisory panel and cybersecurity advisory panel; the International Integrated Reporting Council; the International Corporate Governance Network’s corporate risk oversight committee; and the Society for Corporate Governance’s environmental and social working group. She is also executive director of Prudential’s Sustainability Council and executive sponsor of Prudential’s ADAPT initiative.
Peggy received her BA, magna cum laude, and JD d from the University of Notre Dame. She is admitted to the New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey (in-house) Bars.
Veena Ramani is senior program director, capital markets systems at Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit organization working with the most influential investors and companies to build leadership and drive solutions throughout the economy. She leads Ceres’ work on critical market levers that will help scale the transition to sustainable capital markets. These include governance systems that companies should put in place at the corporate board level to allow for effective board sustainability oversight. She also oversees Ceres’ work to engage financial regulators on climate change as a systemic risk under the umbrella of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets.
Veena is the author of the 2020 Ceres report Addressing Climate as a Systemic Risk: A call to action for US Financial Regulators, which makes the case that climate change poses a systemic risk to US financial markets and outlines over 50 action steps that financial market regulators can take to address this risk.
Veena has also authored and co-authored a number of reports on board sustainability governance, including View from the Top: How Corporate Boards Engage on Sustainability Performance (2015), Lead from the Top: Building Sustainability Competence on Corporate Boards (2017), Systems Rule: How Board Governance Can Drive Sustainability Performance (2018), Getting Climate Smart: A Primer for Corporate Directors in a Changing Environment (2018) and Running the Risk: How Corporate Boards Can Oversee Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Issues (2019).
Veena has been interviewed in a number of corporate governance publications around governance for sustainability, including in the cover story of the 2017 fall edition of C Suite magazine. Her work has been featured by NACD, Corporate Secretary, Pensions & Investment, CQ Roll Call, Marketwatch, Ethical Boardroom, GreenBiz, Huffington Post, Environmental Leader and Responsible Investor.
From 2006 to 2015, Veena managed the relationships with a wide portfolio of Ceres Company Network members, including in the financial services sector and the electric power sector. Veena worked with boards and senior company management on opportunities to integrate sustainability into their business structures and decision making, including around policy and program development, disclosures, and stakeholder engagement processes. Prior to Ceres, Veena worked as a management consultant with CDM, an environmental consulting firm focused on providing a variety of sustainability services to clients in the public and private sectors. Veena also spent three years with Integrative Strategies Forum, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization working on developing national and international policy solutions around sustainable development by building consensus and coalitions among civil society groups on these issues and lobbying government representatives. Before that, Veena practiced law in India.
Veena received a Masters in Law degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA LLB (honors) degree from the National Law School of India University in Bangalore.
Christopher Rowe is a Managing Director of CPG. He is responsible for leading CPG’s socially responsible investment engagement strategy and outreach initiatives. He works to build relationships with companies in which CPG invests, peer organizations, The Episcopal Church, and other stakeholders with similar values. Additionally, he works on behalf of the Chief Investment Officer to oversee various aspects of administration for the Investments Department, including communications and compliance.
Prior to CPG, Christopher was Chief of Staff to the CEO of PGIM, Prudential Financial’s asset management business, where he was responsible for wide-ranging activities including business administration, external relations, and sustainability. Earlier in his career, he worked directly with institutions and faith-based investors on strategies for integrating values with investments.
He received a BA in Economics from Haverford College and an MBA in Finance from New York University. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
The Rev. Kirsten Snow Spalding is Senior Program Director at Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit organization working with the most influential investors and companies to build leadership and drive solutions throughout the economy. She leads the Ceres Investor Network, a group of more than 150 institutional investors collectively managing more than $24 trillion in assets and advancing leading investment practices, corporate engagement strategies, and policy solutions to build an equitable, sustainable global economy and planet. Before assuming leadership of the Investor Network, she represented Ceres on the West Coast for all investor programs from 2007-2017.
Prior to joining Ceres, she served as chief deputy treasurer under California State Treasurer Phil Angelides and director of the treasurer’s environmental financing authorities. Prior to her government service, Kirsten worked in the labor movement as chief of staff for the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. With the California Sierra Club and the Ella Baker Center, Kirsten co-founded the California Apollo Alliance. For six years she chaired the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and taught at Boalt Hall School of Law. As a lawyer with the firm of Beeson, Tayer, & Bodine she represented unions and their pension plans.
In her early career, Kristen worked as a community and cultural organizer in Durban, South Africa. She holds a BA from Yale College in music, a JD from Hastings College of Law, and an MDiv from Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She is rector of the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, San Rafael, a wife, and the mother of two teenage sons.
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