Senior Advisor to Jan Peter Balkenende
In 2011, Jan Peter Balkenende, who had served as former Prime Minister of The Netherlands from 2002-2010, joined EY as a Senior Partner with a focus on corporate responsibility. As Nancy Kamp-Roelands and I had already been working on driving EY’s initial integrated sustainability strategy for The Netherlands and Belgium, we teamed up with him to take this agenda further.
In 2012, 2013 and 2014, I was senior advisor to Jan Peter Balkenende. This involved areas such as:
Advice: developed a framework to assess the hundreds of requests that reached him, while acting as key advisor on selected requests.
Research and intelligence: ensuring the latest insights, studies, trend and developments in the field of corporate sustainability.
Support: representing and/or joining Jan Peter Balkenende during meetings, at his request.
Communications: speech writing, reviewing and preparing media engagements, etc.
I combined this unique role with my work for the Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition and my role as EY Corporate Responsibility Leader for Belgium and The Netherlands.
“When I was a Partner at EY, part of Paulette’s responsibilities as Corporate Responsibility (CR) Leader was heading up the team of Dutch Sustainable Growth Coalition (DSGC) CEO liaisons. She also contributed substantially to raising EY’s CR profile, by continuously offering useful advice to (managing) partners and others. She did an excellent job advising me at a strategic level, offering specific expertise on the integration of sustainability into business models, and served as a sparring partner both generally and in relation to EY’s sustainability services.”