Meet Dr. Lisette Cooper, A 2022 Freedom Awards Honoree
ECPAT-USA is hosting our annual Freedom Awards on September 20th at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan. It will be a night of celebration and education in the fight to combat child sex trafficking and exploitation. We want to introduce you to this year’s distinguished honorees and allow them to share more about themselves, their contributions to end child trafficking, and so much more.
We kick off this series with our interview of Dr. Lisette Cooper.
Dr. Cooper is a highly accomplished woman, recently recognized in Worth Magazine’s Groundbreakers 2021: 50 Women Changing the World, founded award-winning Athena Capital Advisors, and now serves as the Vice Chair of Fiduciary Trust International. She is also the mother of a courageous Survivor of trafficking who is an Advocate who works to prevent and address trafficking.
When asked why she’s committed to advocacy for girls and women, and how she finds the time to do this, she shared the following:
Well I’ve always heard that if you want to get something done, give it to someone who’s busy, because they’ll get it done. So, I guess that is why I have always found a way to get something done if it is important to me.
And it is important for me to stand up for women and girls, because I grew up as a girl, and I’m now a woman, so I sit in that seat, and I sit in that seat from a child of teenage parents who didn’t always live in the best of neighborhoods. I lived across the street from the Winchester Gun Factory in New Haven Connecticut, and went to school with mostly Black and Brown children, and then moved on to the Southside of Chicago. I was able to go on to get a PhD, live in fancy places, but I recalled where I came from, and even while getting my education and studying the sciences, I was the only woman, or one of few women in my classes. With this background, I always wanted to be an advocate for people to get a fair shake in life; and that brought me to my work in impact investing.
I had started my own company in the investment field and it had become pretty successful, but one of the things that I was most interested in doing was helping my clients find what they really cared about and had a passion for; and around the time of the 2016 election, I had many clients who were women, and we began doing something called gender lens investing, which involved investing money into opportunities that help other women. It was very satisfying to them, as this was also the time of the “Me Too Movement”, so people were really starting to have conversations about sexual violence, and that it was something that was still happening to adult women, as well. Things continued to unfold with the R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein cases highlighting all sorts of bad things that were happening to young women, and then there was the infamous Access Hollywood tapes and the Presidential election.
People were not just engaged, but were really angry. I had dinner with one of my clients the day after the 2017 Pink Hat March [Women’s March in Washington DC] and we expressed how upset we’ve been over all of this. My clients and I acknowledged that we were doing the general lens investing, but wondered about whether there was something more that we could do with our money, something that could address all of this gender-based violence. What could we do?
We continued to have these conversations and discovered something called Shareholder Engagement, and realized that one way to have a voice, and help to address sexual violence against women and children, was to work with the tech companies, by doing shareholder engagement with them. In fact, I got involved with the very first demonstration of shareholder engagement to stop online child abuse and sexual exploitation. Working with that first company, which was Verizon, and that quickly opened the door for us to work with many different tech companies.
Still, Verizon didn’t want to initially speak to us so we worked in coalition, it wasn't just my group of shareholders. We joined the Women's Inclusion Project that had already been doing this work, there were Catholic investors and many of them are big supporters of ECPAT-USA, and there was The Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility (ICC); and the Christian Brothers Investment Service (CBIS) helped to lead the way. I was a co-filer and so many of these other organizations were co-filers. After not wanting to initially have anything to do with us, Verizon hired a Head of Child Safety and divested themselves of some of their properties that were doing egregious things, such as the platform called Tumblr, and they cleaned up and put more protections on their Yahoo search engine, which they owned at the time.
Despite their delays on getting onboard, Verizon went above and beyond, particularly in what they reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they started to actually help prosecute predators who are using their platforms and get convictions, which was just a wonderful thing, so the next couple of years we were in dialogue with them, and this year they completed their first ever child safety report analyzing their entire platform. And we think it's kind of leading edge on what the whole industry should be doing.
Dr. Cooper was asked to explain what impact investing is, and how she’s used this strategy to engage shareholders to cause systemic change:
Well with traditional investing people invest with the purpose of getting a financial return, and with impact investing one invests for the purpose of a financial return and also a social or environmental return. So you purposefully, intentionally, are trying to get an additional impact that's in alignment with your values, in addition to getting a financial return. With the families and institutions that I work with, this is what they’re focused on, and they usually want to do that and still get a market rate return. They want to do well and do good at the same time. Impact investing is really wonderful and actually just makes you feel better as a human being, in that you have integrity, and the different parts of you are in alignment. You're not turning away from how you're making your money, or how you're doing your work, or maintaining your livelihood; you're doing that and still doing good.
There was actually a certain point in working in the financial field where I felt like I can't go on and keep doing this unless my own values can be aligned with the work that I'm doing, and it was great that I had families to work with that wanted this. They wanted to focus on the environment, or they wanted to focus on giving economic justice to all and lifting people out of poverty, and they wanted to focus on providing opportunity to women and people of color, and to have racial and gender equality. That was very exciting for me to know; that people cared about these things. And they wanted to do something, not just in their life and their volunteer activity, but also with their money.
Dr. Cooper shared her initial reaction to hearing that she was nominated to receive this year’s Freedom Award:
I was stunned and was like “Oh, my God, I can't believe this is happening!” I thought “Why me?” There are so many people who are deserving of this honor, and it's very humbling. I can't believe it. And I know that these efforts take a village. There's so many people that I worked with to make any kind of change that we did. It was definitely a huge team effort. I'm so appreciative and grateful. And when I get up there on that stage I have a bunch of people that I want to thank.
Dr. Cooper wanted to share the following to those who want to stop human trafficking, have an empathetic heart, but don’t how or where to start; and may feel like there is no role that they can play in this fight:
I would say that there's always a place to start, and that you just need to look. Just open your eyes and look around you in our environment, where you are, where you live, where you work, and realize that human trafficking is all around us, and that people have no idea how close to home it is. There are truly so many ways to help. For most people, you can start in your local community by identifying the organizations that make a difference in human trafficking in your local community. And those can be found by looking at the partner organizations for ECPAT-USA or partner organizations of THORN. We have a website https://www.keepkidssafeonline.org, and we have some organizations listed on the site, as well as resources at the bottom of the page.
You just have to make the decision to take a stand and do something, anything. Human trafficking is happening right in front of our eyes and because of the Internet there are children who are online who are being harmed everywhere. Unfortunately, the way human nature is, there are people who are being harmed in person in pretty much every community. I think of the area that I’m in, here in Wayland (Massachusetts), which is an affluent suburb, but there was human trafficking uncovered at a local massage parlor.
I’m saying all of this as the mother of a Survivor, my daughter was groomed online on Facebook, now it happens more on Instagram. She was groomed and then met someone in person, and was consequently kidnapped and trafficked. She chose to come out publicly to speak about her trafficking experience, and now spends her life fighting to help Survivors of trafficking. She is courageous and I’m proud of her.
Don’t contemplate what you can do and just find some way to act, because these traffickers just think of these children as ways to make money; they're just commodities. They're just a vehicle for financial gain. They're absolutely the polar end of the spectrum from impact investors. Impact investors invest to be good. These people are totally ignoring the morality of their choices and they are being extractive. Instead of being additive and trying to create good, they are willing to create harm in order to profit themselves and they're willing to create extreme harm in order to satisfy their own or someone's needs and wants. If they can make money from it, that's what they're gonna do. It’s a completely unethical business model that involves a tremendous amount of suffering, and we simply have to get together and collectively say, no, we're not going to allow that.
As shareholders it’s our responsibility to point out to the companies that we invest in where they may be allowing great harm to happen on their platforms, and if they do not stop this from happening, they will suffer grave reputational damage; and that we will push for regulation. We readily ask, who could be for trafficking?, yet there are ongoing debates about privacy for adults versus safety for children, and I have engaged in those debates. What I truly love about the work that we’ve been doing is that we’ve been able to become a BIG voice in the debate, and there has been much legislation that’s come out in the past couple of years that’s prioritizing the protection of children.
To that point, ECPAT-USA should be very proud about the work that you’re doing, and we are happy to add our voice to the mix. I’m really happy that shareholders came out in favor of safety for children, because companies listen to their shareholders.
Outside of being presented the Freedom Award on September 20th, what Dr. Cooper looks forward to the most about attending the benefit event is…
I’m extremely excited about attending, and it’s provided a great opportunity for me to invite friends and family, as well as invite some people who have been leading the charge and who care deeply about this issue. We’ll be bringing them all together to meet each other. I’m also excited to be with the ECPAT-USA family. I’m looking forward to the celebration of the progress that we’ve made towards helping children get free from trafficking and abuse, and there is just a great deal of joy in knowing that we will be standing together.
Dr. Cooper wanted to share the following final thoughts:
There are actually a couple of things that I would like to share. First, this work can be extremely hard and discouraging so it is important for ECPAT-USA to hold a gala to encourage people. It’s important to celebrate, and “gear up” for whatever the task is at hand, next.
It’s also important to recognize all of the various stakeholders contributing to anti-trafficking efforts. Even the ones that you wouldn’t expect. This year, I had an interesting tour of a Homeland Security facility, and they were doing fantastic work both locally, and the Portland office in Massachusetts was doing all this work, rescuing children in the Philippines who are being trafficked; particularly through online child sexual exploitation. The group of agents that I met with, were so dedicated to helping children and were doing all of this work remotely. Before meeting them, I never thought of Homeland Security as being an ally in this fight, and they just want people to know that they are there as a resource. Homeland Security Investigations is there to help survivors, and to get the bad guys, to get the predators. They really care about that, and they are not here to deport anybody or send anyone away. They really really do care very much about protecting children.
Another thing that I would like to mention is that we filed shareholder resolutions at Facebook, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and we have dialogues with Alphabet, Apple, and AT&T. This is an incredible amount of movement, especially with Facebook, as challenging as they are (such as delaying their end-to-end encryption of messenger).
Other things are coming along, like age verification. There are several pieces of legislation related to this. One that just passed in California is called the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act which is very similar to the UK Online Safety Bill; there is also the European Union Digital Services Act and the US (KOSA) Kids Online Safety Act, and others. Fortunately, tools are getting better. The Internet wasn't set up to be safe for children. So, we have to be intentional about making it, and if tech companies aren't going to make it safe, we're gonna have to force them to make it safe.
