Board: Benetech

Theresa Fay-Bustillos is an accomplished business and nonprofit executive, advisor, and lawyer. She has designed and led responsible governance strategies for multinational corporations in the apparel sector headquartered in the United States and Europe resulting in new product lines and new ways of addressing risk and doing business. As a member of the global executive leadership team at Levi Strauss, she led key initiatives ranging from improving the number and satisfaction of women in senior business roles to the sustainability—both human rights and environmental—of products and supply chain. She is currently researching and writing an article on modernizing nonprofit governance in the age of technology and AI.

She has served on 18 nonprofit boards, usually as the chair of governance, strategy, or the board itself. She currently serves on the board of Benetech, an organization that houses the world’s largest collection of accessible digital content so students with learning disabilities can read books and materials assigned in school. Fay-Bustillos serves as the vice chair and secretary of the board of Benetech and as chair of its governance committee. She just stepped down from the board of the Making Waves Education Foundation, a charter school with an innovative approach to ensuring disadvantaged students graduate from college with no debt and prepared to start a career, where she had served as the chair of the governance committee. She has served on the board of the Council on Foundations as chair of the diversity committee, Fair Trade USA as chair of the governance committee, International Funders for Indigenous Peoples as chair of the board, the Christensen Fund as chair of strategy, Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship as chair of the advisory committee, and many more. 

She led key research on the team incorporating human rights principles into International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group’s performance standards. She led a multi-stakeholder process, which included academics from Oxford University, to develop the first-ever social profit-and-loss statement, which has been used by Kering Group and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development to measure, value, and report on the full range of a corporation’s social benefits and impacts in its operations and supply chain. She also led research on true cost accounting strategies for the Sustainable Food Trust and Prince of Wales Trust.

She has served as general counsel for foundations and nonprofits. She is a lawyer with extensive experience in employment law, constitutional issues, and nonprofit tax laws. She has been a moderator and presenter at Net Impact, Sustainable Food Trust, Prince of Wales Trust, Council on Foundations, Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, and Business for Social Responsibility conferences. She has contributed to Marc Benioff’s book, Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well (2004). She has been listed on the Most Influential Women’s roster for the San Francisco Business Times and has been an invited participant at Fortune magazine’s “Brainstorm,” a meeting of world leaders in Aspen, Colorado. She has a BA degree from UC Berkeley and a JD degree from the UCLA school of law.