Josette Sheeran

She was awarded Japan's Nigata International Food Award, Commandeur de l'Ordre du Mérite Agricole by the government of France, and Brazil's highest civilian award, the Grand Official Order of the ‘Rio Branco,’ and the “Game Changer” award by the Huffington Post.

Ms. Sheeran also serves as the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, appointed on June 20, 2017, representing UN Secretary General António Guterres in advancing Haiti's transition from an aid-dependent economy, at the end of more than 17 years of UN peace-keeping operations. She has crafted the first UN “pay for success” development bond to help secure an end to the transmission of cholera in Haiti.

The New UN's Approach to Cholera in Haiti was launched under former Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon when he publicly apologized for the UN's role in Haiti's cholera epidemic in December 2016. The apology came six years after soldiers from the UN's peacekeeping mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, introduced the disease by contaminating Haiti's Artibonite River, causing more than 10,000 deaths.

Sheeran has expressed commitment to meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015. The World Food Programme, founded in 1963, last year provided food to more than 90 million poor people in more than 80 countries worldwide. Its annual budget was US$1.7 billion in 1993. In 2008, it had a budget of US$3 billion and employed 10,000 people in 78 countries.

Pedro Medrano Rojas, a Chilean diplomat, originally led the UN's cholera response, and left in 2015 upset that the international community failed to "acknowledge the fact that we have in Haiti the largest epidemic in the Western Hemisphere." Dr. David Nabarro was originally placed in charge of fundraising for the UN's new approach.

Prior to her tenure as Under Secretary, Sheeran served as Deputy United States Trade Representative in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). There, she was responsible for trade negotiations and treaties in Asia and Africa, driving U.S. efforts to open new markets and enforce existing trade agreements in China, East Asia, South Asia and Africa and for advancing global negotiations on counterfeiting, pharmaceuticals, labor, environment and trade capacity building. One of her legacy projects was fighting global counterfeiting, creating STOP – Strategy Targeting Organized Piracy' and the protection of Intellectual Property. She helped bring to a successful conclusion the landmark U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), which is expected to increase U.S. exports to Australia by $2 billion a year. She also led trade enforcement negotiations with China and furthered U.S. trade and investment interests in direct talks with Japan, Korea, India and many other nations.

In January 2012, Sheeran announced that she would assume the role of Vice Chairman of the World Economic Forum upon completing her term at WFP in 2012.

In 2011, Forbes named her the world's 30th most powerful woman; Foreign Policy listed her among its top 100 global 'Twitterati'. She was a Fisher Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center in 2013. She graduated from the University of Colorado and has been awarded numerous honorary doctorate degrees, including from Michigan State University and the University of Colorado.

Her late father, James J. Sheeran inspired her public service. As a young man, he parachuted into Sainte-Mère-Église with the 101st Airborne Division on D-Day. After returning from World War II he organized a food drive to benefit some of the villages he had helped to liberate. He later served as New Jersey's Insurance Commissioner and as mayor of West Orange, New Jersey. A few months before his death, the French Ambassador decorated him with the insignia of the Légion d'honneur.

In April 2008, Sheeran attracted worldwide attention with a speech in London warning about an impending worldwide food crisis, which she likened to a "silent tsunami" and lobbied the United States and other governments to give more aid to the world's poor. In January 2009, Sheeran called on the government of Israel to allow more UN food aid to the people in Gaza during the conflict there.

She was the eleventh Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in November 2006. Prior to this, Ms. Sheeran served as a diplomat and negotiator for the United States, and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate twice.

Ms. Sheeran serves as a director on numerous boards, including the Capital Group, one of America's oldest and largest investment management organizations. She also serves on the Board of Directors, and as co-chair of the Finance & Human Resources Committee, of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), founded through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 in response to a call from former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who said the time had come for African farmers to wage a “uniquely African Green Revolution.”

Speech from the 20th Annual World Food Prize Symposium 2006 Other

Sheeran got her start in journalism in 1976 with the New York News World, which was owned by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate owned by the Unification Church, which she had recently joined. She served in a number of capacities for News World, eventually becoming their White House correspondent. In 1982 she moved to News World's new sister paper, the Washington Times. Originally a features editor, she was eventually appointed managing editor. During her tenure as managing editor of the Washington Times, she appeared as a commentator on programs such as Nightline, Fox news, The McLaughlin Group, The Diane Rehm Show, and CNN. Sheeran also wrote a nationally syndicated column for Scripps Howard News Service. She has had interviews with more than a dozen heads of state in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States, most famously her interview with North Korean head of state Kim Il Sung. She has twice served as a Pulitzer prize juror.

She earned a BA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1976.

Sheeran was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. She joined the Unification Church in 1975, and in August 1975 her father tried to "rescue" her and her two sisters (against their wishes) from the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York by forcing his way in to see them. He failed, and the scuffle there led to mutual charges of assault. Sheeran left the Unification Church about 1996 and joined the Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Josette Sheeran (born 12 June 1954) is a global economic and humanitarian diplomat and leader, with more than 25 years of experience in managing and transforming institutions to be more effective, transparent and relevant to current challenges and opportunities.

She and her former husband, Whitney Shiner (1949-2017), were divorced. They have three children Nicole, Daniel, and Gabrielle. She has five siblings, James, John, Kim, Victoria, and Jaime.