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Blake Bennett, PhD

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Sally Susman

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Laura Reyes

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Jose de la Fuente

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Steve Isley

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Steve serves as BSR’s Head of AI and Knowledge Management, strengthening BSR’s knowledge systems so they are connected and ready for AI, enabling staff through change management and practical guidance, and building internal AI tools that support BSR’s core work and future opportunities. In this role, Steve helps teams translate BSR’s expertise into usable, organization-wide capabilities—connecting people, content, and workflows.

Previously, Steve founded and led a generative AI sustainable shopping startup, spent six years at Amazon leading sustainable customer research, served as a behavioral scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and managed a wind tunnel at the University of Washington.

Steve holds a PhD in Policy Analysis from Pardee RAND Graduate School; an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology; and a BS in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from the University of Washington.

Insights+ | Tuesday January 6, 2026

Six Key Questions That Will Shape 2026 and Beyond

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Reports | Wednesday December 17, 2025

Advancing People-Centered Climate Action in Private Capital Markets

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Achieving global climate goals will require an estimated US$7.4 trillion in annual investment through 2030, underscoring the vital role of private capital in addressing the climate crisis. The transition across nearly every sector of the economy presents significant opportunities for value creation, but if done poorly, climate strategies can also generate significant risks for people, such as workforce displacement, land grabbing, and reduced affordability of essential services, and in turn generate material risks for investors.

To respond to this challenge, BSR is launching People-Centered Climate Action in Private Markets (PCAP), a global initiative aiming to accelerate alignment between climate strategies and human rights to advance a just transition to a low-carbon and climate-resilient economy. Grounded in international standards for responsible business conduct, PCAP brings together general partners (GPs), limited partners (LPs), civil society organizations, and other stakeholders to develop insights and resources, facilitate shared learning, and enable multi-stakeholder engagement.

Visit the PCAP website to explore practical tools and insights, including:

• People-Centered Climate Action: Guidance for Private Capital Investors: Guidance for private capital investors looking to adopt a people-centered approach to their climate investment strategies, with practical tools, case studies, and due diligence questions for general partners and limited partners.
• People-Centered Climate Action in Food Systems: Investor Guidance: Food systems sit at the heart of climate, nature, and human well-being, and transitioning to low-carbon, climate-resilient, and nature-positive food systems is essential. This report outlines how food system companies can apply human rights and environmental due diligence to identify, address, and account for climate-related human rights impacts and opportunities for stakeholder inclusion.
• Portfolio-Level Just Transition Tool: This tool applies a business model lens to assess how features of current or prospective investees interact with the climate transition, physical climate impacts, and human rights. It also includes example country risk indicators that reflect conditions that influence the likelihood that companies may undermine—or support—a just transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy.
• CSDDD, Climate, and the Just Transition: What It Means for Private Capital: The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive marks a shift in how value is defined in the economy, embedding climate resilience, biodiversity, and respect for human rights as foundational elements. This blog outlines the implications of the directive for private equity and venture capital. 

To learn more about and receive updates on PCAP, please reach out to our team.

Blog | Thursday December 11, 2025

Community Engagement: A Cornerstone of Effective Stakeholder Engagement

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Following our first blog on stakeholder engagement in a changing business landscape and our second on ensuring internal alignment ahead of engagement activities, this is the third blog in a series unpacking the importance of stakeholder engagement, the impact of recent regulations, and aligning stakeholder engagement with well-established industry best practices and expectations set out in standards such as the United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines. 

Local communities play a key role in shaping a company's reputation, license to operate, and ability to attract and retain employees. Stakeholders like customers, suppliers, governments, and investors frequently attract attention from companies because of their recognized roles as enablers of business. However, engagement with people living near business operations and facilities is also key to avoiding costly operational disruptions and ensuring that social and environmental impacts that risk derailing investments are proactively addressed.
 
Community engagement goes beyond information sharing and corporate philanthropy. It is a foundation of responsible business conduct, central to human rights and environmental due diligence, and essential for ensuring that business activities do not cause unintended harm. If done well, it strengthens trust, prevents conflict, and improves outcomes for both companies and communities. When overlooked or done poorly, repercussions can include project failure, costly delays or remediation processes, and reputational damage.  

Who is Included in Community Engagement?  

As explored in our blog on stakeholder engagement in a changing business landscape, stakeholders are people or groups who affect or are affected by a company’s operations. Affected stakeholders are those whose human rights may be directly impacted by a business activity, product, or service. This category includes community members, who may be impacted by business-related operations, infrastructure, environmental change, and economic shifts in their area. 

Engagement is essential to understand how a company’s operations intersect with local livelihoods, cultures, and ecosystems because it can reveal impacts that may not be otherwise visible to a company. 

Communities are not monolithic; different groups have distinct identities, expectations, and rights. Some community members—such as Indigenous Peoples, women, children, and persons with disabilities—are protected by additional international instruments that elaborate specific rights and engagement expectations. 

Why Should Companies Conduct Community Engagement? 

Like other forms of stakeholder engagement, local community engagement involves building respectful, mutually beneficial, ongoing, two-way relationships with people and groups in the places where a company operates. Engagement should be culturally appropriate, gender-responsive, attentive to power dynamics, and tied to clear accountability for how input influences decisions.  

While community engagement is ideally conducted in a sustained, iterative manner, it is especially crucial as part of decision-making ahead of events with potential local impacts. Examples include site openings and closures, construction, significant operational changes, or responses to regulatory requirements.

Drivers for Community Engagement and Its Business Value

Conducting Community Engagement 

Community engagement requires additional attention from companies to ensure it is truly meaningful and appropriately contextualized. Practical tactics include:  

• Investing in internal understanding and alignment by equipping key functions with training, ensuring they can champion these practices across the organization 
• Introducing practical, easy-to-use tools and clear guidance to ensure practices are smoothly adopted into local operations
• Ensuring early engagement and genuine consultation with stakeholders ahead of business-critical decisions to generate buy-in—reflecting stakeholder input through concrete examples and outputs that can be shared
• Embedding board oversight of stakeholder engagement mechanisms and input as part of strategy and risk mitigation

BSR supports companies in planning and conducting community engagement, including mapping and prioritizing stakeholders, determining approaches, and facilitating engagement. Approaches range from monitoring public positions to sharing information, actively soliciting feedback, and co-creating management measures. Recent work includes producing community engagement guidelines for internal use and delivering a train-the-trainer model to enable further engagement, conducting a stakeholder mapping to include previously overlooked community leaders and local organizations, designing a social investment tool to prioritize community investment decisions, and developing strategies and tools to help implement a social risk management approach for new company projects. 

Stakeholder engagement, as a responsible business tool grounded in international standards and increasingly part of regulatory requirements, remains crucial for companies to strengthen relationships and make better decisions when it comes to managing risk. To learn more about how BSR can help your company develop and implement a meaningful approach to stakeholder engagement, reach out to BSR’s Human Rights and Transformation teams.  

Blog | Tuesday November 25, 2025

Effective Stakeholder Engagement: Ensuring Internal Company Alignment

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Case Studies | Sunday November 23, 2025

Human Rights Due Diligence in the Financial Sector: A Compendium of Industry Case Studies and Practice

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Financial institutions play a vital role in the global transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy that upholds human rights and ensures that no one is left behind. With influence across industries, they hold unique leverage to promote responsible business conduct across the value chain. 

BSR, the Danish Institute for Human Rights, and Shift have partnered to publish Human Rights Due Diligence in the Financial Sector: A Compendium of Industry Case Studies and Practice. This publication illustrates how financial actors are implementing human rights due diligence (HRDD) in line with international standards, including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. 

Through six in-depth case studies, the compendium explores how banks, investors, and insurers are embedding HRDD into their governance frameworks, operational processes, and financing activities. It focuses on the downstream value chain—that is, how financial institutions identify, assess, and address actual and potential adverse human rights impacts associated with their corporate clients, portfolio companies, and asset managers. While human rights issues can also arise within institutions’ own operations or supply chains, the most significant impacts typically occur through these downstream relationships. 

The case studies include: 

• ING: Getting human rights risk right through on-the-ground, in-depth assessment 
• SpareBank 1 Sør-Norge: Advancing human rights in corporate lending 
• AP6: Catalyzing respect for human rights in private capital markets 
• AP Pension: Revisiting human rights due diligence governance under new EU sustainable finance regulation 
• NN Group: Embedding sustainability into insurance through policy, engagement, and pragmatic leverage 
• Permira: A human rights journey in private equity 

Together, these examples provide a snapshot of emerging good practices and ongoing efforts to translate human rights commitments into concrete action. The compendium aims to inspire peer learning and accelerate progress across the financial sector toward integrating human rights considerations throughout the downstream value chain.