About Mari
Mari joined NorthStar in 2008 and has been in her role as Director of Shareholder Activism and Engagement since 2011. With over a decade of experience in shareholder activism, Mari helps NorthStar create positive social change using our clients’ investments in publicly traded companies. Mari engages directly with company leadership on a wide range of issues that affect communities, employees, and the environment by targeting issues that fall into our firm’s five core focus areas: race & gender, economic inequality, human rights, environmental justice, and corporate governance.
In recent years, Mari has led the activism team to engage portfolio companies in our client portfolios on issues such as LGBTQ rights, board and senior management diversity, the human right to water, corporate political contributions, employee representation on boards, systemic racism in corporate culture, fair chance employment, and prison labor. (Learn more about our shareholder activism here.)
Mari was a lead researcher and co-author of NorthStar’s publication on prison labor, “Prison Labor in the United States: An Investor Perspective.” as well as an upcoming report on fair chance employment and investor engagement opportunities in this area (expected Q4 2022 or Q1 2023). As she performs in-depth research on issues of interest to NorthStar and our clients, Mari also contributes to the investment team’s considerations of social and environmental issues in public equity market.
She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida, as well as a master’s degree from Simmons University. As of November 2022, Mari was appointed to the board of directors at the Thirty Percent Coalition, an organization working to improve board diversity in corporate boardrooms across the U.S. Mari also serves on the Education Committee at her local Jewish synagogue and has volunteered with Jewish Family Services, an organization focused on welcoming, teaching, and empowering new refugee families that are settling in the western Massachusetts area. Mari routinely acts as a panelist or guest speaker at conferences as well as in university classrooms, specifically at UMass Amherst and Mount Holyoke College, sharing her expertise and experience with eager audiences.