Executive Director,
Fred Sullivan — Co-Founder and Executive Director
Artist, activist, and entrepreneur, Fred Sullivan co-founded Man Up Campaign with Jimmie Briggs in 2009. He served first as Director of Technology and has been Executive Director since 2015. He also serves as Chief Executive Officer and focal point for the organization’s delegation to the UN Economic and Social Council.
His vow as Executive Director is to keep activating young people of all genders to end gender-based violence — supporting the movement for equality, inclusiveness, and opportunity, and working at the root causes rather than the symptoms. He believes a change in outcomes for women and girls will change the world for the better as no other cause can. He does this work because it is right.
In 1997, working for the World Federalist Movement, convenor of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court, he built the Coalition’s website, and the Rome Conference site the following year. He recovered negotiating documents from gopher and telnet archives that had never reached the web and assembled them into four environments serving four audiences: an illustrated introduction for the public, a news section for journalists and PrepCom delegates, a testimonial archive for signatories, and a document library. A persistent index drove an independently scrolling frame, giving delegates a single navigable map across resources that had no common index anywhere else. The United Nations’ own conference site ran to a handful of pages and did not launch until three weeks before Rome opened. Secretary-General Kofi Annan credited the work as one of the key factors in facilitating the International Criminal Court Treaty, after a century of effort toward it.
He has since worked with the Hague Appeal for Peace, the People’s Millennium Assembly at the United Nations, and the preparatory conferences for Rio+20.
At the UN, he played a key role in establishing official youth participation in the Commission on the Status of Women, through the 2016 and 2017 Youth Forums, their inclusion in the Agreed Conclusions, and the youth dialogues that followed. Securing Special Consultative Status with ECOSOC in 2017 opened the way for Man Up Campaign leaders and youth leaders from partner organizations to speak and help draft recommendations across the CSW, the ECOSOC Forum, the High-Level Political Forum, the NGO Major Groups, the General Assembly, the 2017 Ocean Conference, the BBNJ negotiations, and the Secretary-General’s Climate Conference in 2019. He serves on the NGO Task Force to ratify ILO Convention 190, ending violence and harassment in the world of work, and is a World Ocean Council Associate.
He is also founder and Executive Director of Blue Ocean Future, a separate organization working on natural capital measurement and area-based integrated finance. The two bodies of work meet at one argument, which Fred has put before the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in Seville and the Beyond GDP consultations: the capital exists, and the gap is governance. Natural capital has to be measured before it can be financed — and young people have to be inside the enterprises that finance reaches, not credentialed outside them.
Fred founded LiQ, a technology company later sold to a publicly traded company. His agency NetReaction built Pihana Pacific’s web portal, online marketing, and brand strategy, work that helped realize Pihana’s merger of equals with Equinix and i-STT. He has delivered projects for Hugo Boss, Trammell Crow, Sumitomo Corporation, Sony, and NTT DOCOMO, among other commercial and social ventures.
GSMART is not theory for him. He was a pioneer participant in youth soccer in Des Moines, Iowa, and competed in football, wrestling, and track. He has danced for more than two decades in modern and classical dance, studying with mentors including Maggie Black and Merce Cunningham. You may still find him choreographing, performing, dancing Argentine tango, or teaching — lately on figure skates, supporting his daughter in her sport and volunteering with Ice Theatre of New York.
He has real trust in the capacity of young leaders to meet the challenges of now and what comes next.
