Michelle Nunn has been selected to receive the 2022 International Executive of the Year Award by the Academy of International Business (AIB). This distinguished honor will be conferred on Ms. Nunn at AIB 2022 Miami, where she will deliver the Keynote Speech at the Plenary Opening Ceremony on July 6, 2022.
Ms. Nunn is awarded this honor in recognition of her unsurpassed leadership in the area of diversity and inclusion. As President and CEO of CARE she has shown that equal human rights are the indispensable cornerstone for ending global poverty. Under Ms. Nunn’s leadership, CARE has become the leading humanitarian organization that fights global poverty and offers aid to refugees worldwide. Most recently, she has turned her efforts to helping women and children who are taking an incredible toll in the pandemic with CARE’s #I’m Every Woman’s Campaign, celebrating CARE’s 75th anniversary this spring 2022. Ms. Nunn demonstrates the linkage between equal human rights and mobilizing strategic action, a link that is critical for solving the world’s most pressing problems.
On behalf of myself, the AIB Fellows, and the award’s nominating committee—Mary Yoko Brannen (Chair), Ruth Aguilera, Paula Caligiuri, Cristina Gibson, Saeed Samiee, and Jagdish Sheth—please join us in congratulating Ms. Nunn on her selection for this well-deserved honor.
Lorraine Eden, Dean, AIB Fellows
About Michelle Nunn
As the President and CEO of CARE USA, Michelle Nunn leads a global team of 7,000 people working in more than 100 countries to save lives, defeat poverty, and achieve social justice. Under her leadership CARE has taken its fundraising and impact to new levels, including reaching the highest revenue in the organization’s history and overseeing programs that reached more than 90 million people.
CARE is one of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations with a holistic approach to program areas that deliver maximum impact: crisis response, food and water, health, education and work, climate change and, most importantly, gender equality as a major focus for each of these areas.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, CARE marked its 75th Anniversary and Nunn led a $100M Crisis Response Campaign that not only met its target early, it exceeded $150M and provided resources for urgent needs around the world. Included in CARE’s response was a re-launch of the CARE Package, an iconic symbol of American generosity, and the organization’s first-ever programming effort in the United States. In the first year, more than 6 million CARE Packages were delivered.
Nunn built a career of service as a social entrepreneur and non-profit CEO. In 1989 she co-founded the volunteer-mobilization organization Hands On Atlanta, which under her leadership, grew from a group of friends working on six projects a month to one of the nation’s largest civic action and volunteer hubs. In 2007, she led the merger between Hands On and President George H.W. Bush’s Points of Light – the world’s largest volunteer-service organization. Nunn’s experience with Hands On and Points of Light further reinforced her belief that lasting impact comes from people advocating for change at the community level. Nunn served as Points of Light CEO from 2007 to 2013.
Nunn entered into the political arena in 2014 and was nominated as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from Georgia. After her campaign, she took the reins of CARE USA in 2015, where her work continues to be informed by the imperative of government, civil society, and the private sector collaborating with citizens to create stronger, more resilient communities.
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Virginia, Nunn majored in history with a minor in religion and earned her master’s degree in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She also received a Kellogg Fellowship to study faith and social justice in more than a dozen countries, from Peru to Namibia to Jordan.
