Governance

Our Human Rights Coalition is sponsored at Board level by John Ross, CEO, IGA. As Board Co-Sponsor, he actively drives and supports the work of the Coalition Committee and present the team’s progress to their peers during our bi-annual Board of Directors meetings.

The Steering Committee is Chaired by Paul Lalli, Global VP, Human Rights, The Coca-Cola Company; Virginie Mahin, Senior Director Global Social Sustainability & Stakeholder Engagement, Mondelēz International, Rachel Elliott, General Manager Sustainability – Human Rights, Woolworths Group and Jessica Rivas, Director Human Rights, McDonald’s.

The Steering Committee has the mission of driving collaboration between retailers and manufacturers and building on the consumer goods companies’ long history in promoting decent working conditions. It identifies key foci and recommends corresponding actions to the Board, steers the broad implementation of these commitments across the industry, and creates meaningful collaborations with external stakeholders. Finally, Steering Committee members act as champions of our projects within their own companies all for the overarching objective to drive impactful change to ensure respect for Workers’ rights throughout global value chains.

In the spirit of collective action, the HRC also works closely with other Coalitions of Action at the CGF. As the CGF’s technical benchmark for third-party sustainability standards that are relevant in global supply chains, the Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative (SSCI) works with the HRC to help ensure the social compliance standards included in the SSCI criteria are well understood within the HRC strategies. In particular, the SSCI supports the HRC’s work on human rights due diligence (HRDD) by providing alignment and insights on the industry’s expectations for social sustainability standards in managing their auditing/certification programmes. 

The HRC is also engaging in dialogues with the Forest Positive Coalition to help ensure the latter Coalition’s strategy for ending commodity-driven deforestation is not only supportive of the environment, but also of the peoples and communities who live and work in forests. This means, for example, ensuring the HRC’s PIPs are strongly integrated into the Forest Positive Approach and raising awareness through greater cross-sector dialogues about how human rights and deforestation concerns are related. The two Coalitions are working together particularly on the issue of palm oil, but are committed to ensuring forest positive means people positive for all commodities.