Amy Galland, PhD MBA is the principal of Empower Venture Partners. She is the founder and former CEO of NTWC, an image-based technology company dedicated to reducing body shaming and sexual violence that was acquired in October 2016.
Amy has almost twenty years of experience providing entrepreneurs, artists, investors, multinational corporations and NGOs expertise in strategic planning; managing regranting programs; curating and facilitating multistakeholder coalitions; leading corporate engagements; and delivering actionable corporate and social research and report writing.
She collaborates with clients to develop and implement successful business and campaign strategies; analyze, create systems for, and report on the environmental and social impacts of business operations; analyze the environmental and social impacts of financial portfolios; drive stakeholder consensus; assess markets and market opportunities; and design and implement innovative communications and funding models.
Through her work, Amy has helped her clients to exceed business and campaign goals; move multinational corporations on critical components of corporate social responsibility; and obtain environmental commitments from pension funds, electric utilities, and manufacturing and retail companies.
Accomplishments include:
- Mobilized the climate movement to address private equity’s role in expanding fossil fuel infrastructure
- Published multiple reports that helped to improve the environmental and social performance of corporate actors
- Facilitated corporate engagements that yielded company commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; increase disclosure on toxic waste management; and provide safe Mercury clean-up information on all CFL packaging sold in the US
- Designed locally-driven recycling projects across Africa
- Published articles and reports that contributed to halting the development of what would have been the first coal-fired electricity generation plant in East Africa (appeal still pending in the courts)
- Calculated the monetary value of recyclable packaging materials in the waste stream, a metric used by Goldman Sachs and Walmart to establish a $100MM loan fund for recycling infrastructure
- Played a key role in securing policy changes at two significant US pension funds that eliminated fossil fuel investment via their private equity holdings, and helped a third fund vote against a $10MM investment due to the firm’s record on environmental justice unveiled in a report she facilitated
- Collaborated to achieve key victories at the SEC regarding Form PF resulting in the elimination of side letters that had previously been used by private equity funds to disempower investors by pitting them against one another