Bob Massie (politician) - Work

Work

From 1989 to 1996 Massie lectured at Harvard Divinity School, and served as Director of the Project on Business Values and the Economy there, and forging ties between the Business and Divinity School communities.

He participated in the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in 1991, and that year was also awarded a Henry Luce Fellowship (1991–1993).

In 1993 he received a Senior Fulbright Research Award which enabled him to spend six months in South Africa, lecturing at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business and traveling the country to research a history of the anti-apartheid Movement in which he had participated as a college student. His book, "Loosing The Bonds: America and South Africa In The Apartheid Years", was completed over the next four years, and published by Doubleday in 1997. It won the Lionel Gelber Prize for the Best Book on International Relations in 1998 and was reviewed favorably across the United States, including the New York Times.

In 1994 he won the statewide primary election and became the Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts. Although he did not win, the campaign gave him the opportunity to traverse the length and breadth of Massachusetts and to meet thousands of citizens from all walks of life, many of whom would remain partners in subsequent issue-oriented initiatives.

From 1996 to 2003 Massie served as the Executive Director of Ceres, the largest coalition of environmental groups and institutional investors in the United States, increasing that organization’s size and revenue ten-fold during his tenure. He also proposed and led the creation of the Investor Network on Climate Risk and the Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk, a major gathering of public and private sector financial leaders held every two years at UN Headquarters in New York City.

In 1998, in partnership with the United Nations and major U.S. foundations, he co-founded the Global Reporting Initiative with Dr. Allen White of the Tellus Institute, and served as its Chair until 2002.

Ceres and GRI pursue an innovative approach to corporate responsibility which relies on transparency and reputational incentives as opposed to traditional bureaucratic regulation alone. Initially considered impractical, this approach has proven far more effective and efficient at improving social, environmental and human rights performance than traditional regulatory methods alone. More than two thousand major corporations and institutional investor groups now voluntarily participate in Ceres and GRI corporate disclosure standards.

In 2002, Massie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the field of finance by CFO Magazine. In the same year, he learned that he had contracted Hepatitis C from his blood medications. This illness proved a far more stubborn adversary than the hemophilia and HIV he had battled with relative success for much of his life, eventually causing severe liver damage that forced him to reduce his role at Ceres and GRI while awaiting a transplant. During this period, he continued to serve on a number of boards, and was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School.

In 2008, while gravely ill, he founded and co-chaired the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Coalition, and led a campaign against slot machine and casino gambling in Massachusetts. In that year he was awarded the Damyanova Prize for Corporate Social Responsibility by the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University, and in April, 2009 he received the Joan Bavaria Innovation and Impact Awards for Building Sustainability in Capital Markets. These awards are normally given to separate persons, but in recognition of his global achievements, he was given both.

In June, 2009 Massie finally received a long-awaited liver transplant, in an innovative “domino transplant” procedure performed at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta which not only cured his Hepatitis C, but his hemophilia as well (the clotting factor is produced in the liver). The impact on his health was immediate and dramatic.

In 2010 he became an investment advisor to Domini Social Impact Fund, and a member of the Board of the Sustainable Investments Institute (Si2), and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Hauser Center.

In January, 2011, his recovery complete and his health restored, Massie declared his candidacy for the United States Senate and began actively campaigning for the Democratic nomination for that office. In April, 2011, noted Democratic strategist Joe Trippi joined the Massie campaign. Massie ended his campaign on October 7, citing the entrance of Elizabeth Warren into the race.

In March 2012 Massie became the president of the New Economics Institute, an organization dedicated to moving the American economy towards greater justice and sustainability.

His autobiography, "A Song in the Night: A Memoir of Resilience" was published in 2012 by Nan Talese/Doubleday books.