OUR TEAM
Luc Zandvliet
Director of TRA, Lead of Social Performance Practice
Luc is the Founder and Director of TRA and leads TRA’s Social Performance Practice. Luc is driven to ensure that the corporate presence demonstrably leaves people better off. Luc has conducted more than 180 site visits with 40+ companies. He is frequently asked by senior leadership teams to advise on their approach and support companies in the development of their social performance management systems. Luc has authored various guidelines and tools for the Canadian Government and industry organizations like PDAC and IPIECA, and a book on company-community relations.
Luc provides day-to-day oversight and direction to the different projects implemented by TRA. His focus is on ensuring that TRA projects are rigorous, effective, and practical. He predominantly works on projects that develop models to address emerging challenges and expectations facing companies. This includes benchmarking exercises and other assignments that form the basis for establishing new models for effectiveness of company implementation. In addition to working directly with companies and financial institutions, Luc also works on pro-bono initiatives that further the social performance agenda, including the Responsible Mining Index and Social Practice Forum.
Luc’s main technical expertise is engagement, grievance mechanisms, and social performance management systems. He often provides management teams and boards with a forward-looking perspective and advice on addressing a critical issue at hand. Luc is part of various independent expert panels related to project oversight, closure, and compliance review mechanisms.
Lloyd Lipsett
Lead of Human Rights Practice
Lloyd is an international human rights lawyer with over 20 years of experience working with leading companies, governments, national human rights institutions, civil society organizations and indigenous peoples. He has developed a niche in the field of business and human rights, with a focus on implementing human rights due diligence processes (HRDD) and human rights impact assessments (HRIA) in challenging contexts. In particular, he has led or participated in over 30 HRIAs and has conducted over 75 site visits to implement HRIA or HRDD processes around the world.
Lloyd regularly advises senior leaders and managers in companies (and within governments and other organizations) on how to manage the increasingly complex social expectations, legal requirements and business risks associated with human rights. Lloyd regularly publishes and makes presentations on a wide range of human rights issues relevant to companies, industry associations, governments and investors.
Prior to joining TRA, Lloyd founded LKL International Consulting Inc. in 2008 and has worked with Shift (the leading centre of expertise on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights) as a part-time Senior Associate since 2013. He previously served as the senior assistant to three Presidents of Rights & Democracy (an international human rights institution created by the Parliament of Canada) from 2003 to 2008. He began his career as a litigation and dispute resolution specialist at McMillan Binch in Toronto.
Lloyd’s education is from Queen’s University in philosophy and politics, and then from McGill University in law. He is a member in good standing of the Law Society of Ontario and the International Association of Impact Assessment. He lives in Montreal, Canada and is fluent in English and French.
Karim-André Laz
Karim-André Laz is an expert on security and human rights and the implementation of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights (VPSHR). As a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces’ and training designer for security forces across Africa, Karim has the practical background and experience to operate and communicate effectively with members of the public security and the private security sector.
Between 2006 and 2012, Karim led Rights & Democracy’s work on human rights and democratic development in Africa. He also worked with the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre and the International Bureau for Children’s Rights (IBCR) as a project manager and trainer for security forces across Central and West Africa. Karim has worked in over 40 countries on human rights, children’s rights, health and safety and capacity building for public and private security forces.
Michelle Hassen
Michelle Hassen has 10 years of experience working in the resource sector including as a social performance consultant and as a developer of large-scale renewable energy projects. Her experience spans stakeholder engagement strategies and tools; community investment plans; community well-being indicators and monitoring processes; local employment and procurement plans; benchmarking studies; land acquisitions; and workshops. Her skillset includes managing large projects involving multiple organizations and consultants.
Michelle previously worked in not-for-profit management. She has worked in Canada, the United States, Guatemala, Mexico, Benin, Ghana and Switzerland and has also consulted on projects in Egypt, Kosovo, Burkina Faso and elsewhere. She has an International MBA and a BA in International Relations, and is able to work in French and Spanish.
Vineeta Yadav
Vineeta has over five years of social performance experience based in South Asia. She has worked in site, corporate-based and consulting roles to enable business sustainability.
Before joining TRA, she worked as a social performance advisor for a global metals and mining company based in India. She led corporate strategy for the social license, provided site-based support, and launched group-wide standards on community engagement using ICMM and IFC frameworks. Vineeta started as a local naturalist at Chitwan National Park, Nepal, where she practiced her community engagement skills by living with the forest-dependent communities for about two years.
She also has an MBA in Business Sustainability from TERI School of Advanced Studies and a post-graduate diploma in Advertising and Public Relations from the Indian Institute of Mass Communications. This diversity of her experiences helps her address corporate and site-level social performance challenges with equal rigour.
Larry Dixon
Larry Dixon has over two decades of stakeholder engagement, conflict management, negotiation and agreement making, and collaboration building experience on corporate, economic, health, human rights, and environmental issues. His unique ability to see issues from multiple perspectives and help divergent stakeholders identify the common threads they share enables them to develop meaningful ways to partner.
Larry works with companies to help them manage impacts, advises on company-community agreement making, and specializes in social risk management. He operationalizes leading social practices and standards so they integrate into functional work streams and core business objectives. He has led social performance compliance and assurance efforts for projects to meet corporate and international standards, developed strategies and implemented plans related to social investment, grievance management, and local content both directly and through training and coaching company staff. He provides joint fact finding expertise to the IFC/CAO on projects involving extractive companies across the world. Larry’s industry experience includes extractives and wind energy, agriculture and natural resources, and healthcare. He has worked on projects in Africa, South America, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.
David Reyes
David has a split background – part craftsman, part academic. He comes from a construction family, is a master carpenter, and still practices his trade through a small company in New Hampshire. He has master’s degrees in Peace Studies and International Law, as well as a PhD looking at the intersection of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, sustainability, and natural resource development. David started working with extractive industries in 2002. His first site-based jobs centered around conflict management and multi-party negotiations.
David has experience on projects across Africa, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East and Europe in roles that include leading resettlement, managing external relations, integrating social considerations with design and engineering, and helping companies with the strategies and skills they need to fully respect people’s rights. David’s native language is English, and he also has professional fluency in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. He is a trained mediator, a Board Member of the Social Practice Forum, and he occasionally lectures on topics related to his work.
Ndanga Kamau
Ndanga Kamau is an international lawyer specialising in international dispute settlement and public international law. She has 15 years’ experience of working in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. She has worked in a variety of sectors, among them, infrastructure, oil & gas, mining, telecommunications, and energy. Her clients include private entities, states and state entities, international organisations, and academic institutions.
Ndanga has experience in designing procedures and processes for dispute avoidance, dispute prevention, dispute resolution, and risk mitigation. She advises on informal mechanisms such as grievance mechanisms, negotiation, and mediation, and formal adjudicative mechanisms such as
arbitration and litigation.
Ndanga holds leadership positions in various entities including, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Law Association, the African Association of International Law, the British Institute of International and Comparative Law, and the African Journal of International and
Comparative Law. She regularly writes and lectures on her areas of specialisation at forums around the world.
Ndanga studied in Cape Town, London, and Geneva and speaks English, French, Kiswahili, Kikuyu, and Dutch at varying levels of proficiency.
Georgie Jephson
With over 10 years of experience as a human rights lawyer, Georgie has developed a career in the field of business and human rights law. She has experience in the design and implementation of operational level grievance mechanisms in complex and challenging contexts. She is also experienced in conducting human rights due diligence at site level, to assist multinational corporations work towards reaching alignment with international standards and industry best practice.
Previously, Georgie worked in public interest and constitutional litigation in South Africa. She holds a post graduate law degree from the University of Cape Town and a Masters in law from the University of the Witwatersrand.
Virginie Bergerot
Virginie Bergerot is a human resources management and business administration specialist who supports TRA’s projects in relation to project management, human resources and fieldwork coordination. In addition to supporting the “back office” of TRA’s projects, she supports our field work by conducting interviews and focus group discussions with female workers and community members.
Prior to joining TRA, Virginie worked in the hospitality business and managed large teams of employees and developed a diverse and respectful workplace culture where harassment was not tolerated. She applies this experience in our human rights work, notably in terms of workers’ rights aspects and engagement with the human resources, contracting and procurement departments.
Virginie has diplomas in economics from the Faculty of Law, Economics and Management in Nancy, France and in marketing from ESICAD in Montpellier, France. She is fluently bilingual in French and English.
Carole Samdup
Carole Samdup has 30 years of experience in the field of human rights with specialization in the area of economic and social rights. Her work focus has been on trade and investment policy and its impact on human rights, particularly in Asia.
As senior policy adviser at the International Center for Human Rights & Democratic Development for 18 years, Carole was responsible for the conceptualization and development of an open-source human rights impact assessment tool for community-based reviews of foreign investment projects and she led associated pilot studies in the Philippines, Tibet, Argentina, Peru, and Democratic Republic of Congo among others.
Subsequently, Carole developed a methodology for assessing state compliance related to the human right to food and led fact-finding missions in Malawi, Nepal, Haiti, and Bolivia. Carole has participated in various UN processes to enhance human rights standards and practices and is the author of numerous related reports.