About Us

From 2010 until Si2 shut down at the end of 2024, Heidi Welsh, was the executive director of the Sustainable Investments Institute (Si2). She started covering corporate responsibility issues in the late 1980s and oversaw Si2's operations and research. Welsh was the lead author of several Si2 studies about corporate political influence, some published with the IRRC Institute. Previously, Welsh helped author seasonal and annual reports on proxy voting trends starting in 1987 at the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), closely followed social and environmental shareholders resolutions and their results, and for 16 years ran the monitoring program examining corporate compliance with the MacBride principles for fair employment in Northern Ireland. She co-authored the Carbon Disclosure Project's 2007 report on S&P 500 companies and also set up a global sustainability metrics project for RiskMetrics (now part of MSCI) analyzing 1,800 of the world's biggest companies. Welsh also served on the Global Reporting Initiative's Electric Utility Sector Working Group in 2008-09 and participated in an Oxford University assessment of Northern Ireland's affirmative action legislation. Welsh received her bachelor's degree in political science, cum laude, with a concentration in science, technology and public policy, from Carleton College. She holds a master's degree from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.

A contributing researcher and analyst since Si2's inception, Robin Young oversaw Si2's research efforts in all areas of corporate political activity and related shareholder proposals and co-authored studies on corporate political spending. In addition, he covered all research for executive compensation, mortgage and banking issues as well as contributing to research and reporting on environmental and sustainability proposals. Previously, he was a senior analyst for IRRC, ISS and RiskMetrics (now part of MSCI) from 2005 to 2009. There he assessed a wide range of corporate governance issues, including company-specific compensation plans, management and shareholder sponsored corporate governance issues with special emphasis on mergers, acquisitions and recapitalizations, as well as management and shareholder proposals related to executive compensation. While at IRRC and ISS he also helped collect and verify evergreen and overall dilution data and was a contributing writer to several dilution studies. He helped manage overseas teams and perform quality control checks on data collected by these divisions, as well as helping to maintain and manage the organizations' databases of shareholder proposals. He also worked for RiskMetrics' ESG group, covering political contributions and predatory lending. In addition to writing background materials and company analyses on these topics, he contributed to custom consulting projects, providing research for several clients and helping to develop cases for them on corporate engagement. Before coming to IRRC, Young also worked as loan officer and team leader for several mortgage businesses. He holds B.A. in political science from Colorado College.