In late l997 and early 1998, Ceres became what Massie calls the "honest broker and custodian of an experiment." Five years later, the Global Reporting Initiative, as that experiment came to be called, became an independent entity based in Amsterdam.

Why Amsterdam? Massie and White knew the U.S. wasn't the best place to host such an organization due to the lack of interest among U.S. companies in the "environmental ethic." So they held a competition among different cities to make a case for why GRI should be based in their city. Amsterdam's relative central location and enthusiasm for the project's mission won the day.

By then, thanks to its Herculean multi-stakeholder process, GRI standards had been expanded beyond environmental issues to include social issues such as human rights and workplace safety, as well as corporate governance.

GRI Takes Shape

Back in l997, Massie says, he began raising initial funding to support the effort from a family patriarch. "He said, 'Let me get this straight, you are suggesting that if we give you $100,000, you are going to bring about a complete transformation of the global system of accounting?' I looked at him, and I didn't blink. 'Yes, that's what we're going to do.'"

Ceres began by forming a tight alliance with the United Nations. Over time, it garnered millions of dollars to support the effort from top U.S. and international foundations-Ford, MacArthur, the UN Foundation and others.

But it was an early decision to use the power of the Internet (something that was still quite new) to pull together an international group of committed people who worked to create exposure drafts and have discussions in real time. They moved with lightning speed, and had a working draft within a few months.

"We met internationally, but mostly we did these things through the friendships and connections that the Internet made possible," Massie says.

In the beginning, there were naysayers who told Massie the project was going to fail. "You're probably right," he says he told them. "But it would be less likely to fail if you would contribute your vision of what should happen and if you offered us solutions to the many problems we're facing."

The process was open, meaning that anybody who wanted to could participate. As co-founder of the GRI with White and chair of its steering committee, Massie's job was to bring together people from different communities (businesses, activists, accounting societies, financial advisors, and people from the labor movement, among others) and different cultures (Europe, North America, South Asia, Japan, Brazil and others).

"We designed a process that could receive and process peoples' suggestions from around the planet," Massie says. "We were able to move forward on this partly because people became passionately interested in this, and they contributed a huge amount of intellectual capital."

GRI Today

In 2008, when the GRI held a global conference in Amsterdam, there were officials and other representatives from 77 different countries focused on how to implement GRI's guidelines.