Jean Oelwang

             President and Founding CEO of Virgin Unite

Oelwang Keynote Announcement

Roosevelt Giles, Chairman of the Board of Stakeholders Impact Foundation, Inc., announced that Ms. Jean Oelwang, President and Founding CEO of Virgin Unite, was featured as the keynote at the opening session of the Foundation’s Stakeholders Directors Program on May 16, 2023.

Mr. Giles noted: “We are excited that she shared her first-hand experience of applying the principles of stakeholder capitalism in so many organizations and projects to promote positive change on a number of environmental, social, and governance issues.”

Ms. Oelwang is the founding CEO and President of Virgin Unite, a non-profit foundation set up to unite people and entrepreneurial ideas. She has helped corporations put the well-being of people and the planet at their core. She’s worked with more than 25 Virgin businesses across 15 industries to help embed purpose in everything they do. She also served as a Partner in the Virgin Group leading their people strategy.

Ms. Oelwang spent two decades with partners to lead the incubation and start-up of several collaborative global initiatives, including The Elders, The B Team, The Carbon War Room, Ocean Unite, The Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, 100% Human at Work, The Virgin Unite Constellation and The Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship. She also played a key partner role in the incubation of many other initiatives such as The Audacious Project.

Ms. Oelwang created a not-for-profit initiative, Plus Wonder, inspired by her long-standing passion for the power of partnerships of all kinds. She spent over 15 years working with the likes of Archbishop Desmond and Leah Tutu, former U.S President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn, and Ben and Jerry, to name a few. This set her on a journey to interview sixty of the greatest partnerships and collaborations of our time to learn how to nurture deep connections in our lives. She presents the lessons of those partnerships in a book entitled: ”Partnering: Forge the Deep Connections That Make Great Things Happen”.

Ms. Oelwang also sits on the Advisory Council of The Elders, as well as on a number of boards including RMI, Just Capital, and Virgin Unite.

The Stakeholders Directors Program offered by the Institute introduces a diverse pool of executives for appointment to boards for America’s leading corporations and not-for-profit organizations in both public and private sectors. The Fellows of the Institute are organizational leaders committed to ‘paying forward’ to others while supporting the core mission of their appointed board.

Opportunities for individuals wishing to be selected as fellows in the January 2024 or July 2024 cohort of the Directors Program are encouraged to apply at https://stakeholdergoveranceinstitute.com/apply-now/.

Stakeholders Impact Foundation is a not-for-profit organization seeking transformative change that occurs through full participation of diverse leadership offering fresh insights at the table of governance. The Foundation has created the Stakeholder Directors Program to develop informed and skilled business leaders to effect positive change thru their positions in corporate governance. The Foundation also promotes policies in support of the objectives of stakeholder capitalism; and encourages employees, shareholders, and citizens to engage as advocates to drive excellence in governance.