Elliot Schrage

Elliot Schrage is an American lawyer and business executive. Until June 2018, he was vice president of global communications, marketing, and public policy at Facebook, where he directed the company's government affairs and public relations efforts.

As the Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Platform Marketing at Facebook, Schrage was responsible for developing and coordinating key messages about products, corporate business and partnerships. He also oversaw the company's public policy strategy worldwide.

Schrage joined Facebook from Google, where he was the Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs. He helped broaden and coordinate the company's messaging from a focus on product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Prior to Google, Schrage was the Bernard L. Schwarz Senior Fellow in business and foreign policy at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Earlier in his career, Schrage served as the Senior Vice President of Global Affairs for Gap Inc. and an adjunct professor at Columbia University and Columbia Law School. He has been a contributor to the Harvard Business Review and the Financial Times.

Schrage worked for such groups as Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. Schrage helped to create, and co-taught, the first stand-alone course dedicated to exploring the human rights responsibilities of global business at Columbia Business School in the early 1990s. Later, the course was also offered at Columbia Law School and the School of International Public Affairs. Schrage advised various international corporations and trade associations, assisting them in developing corporate "codes of conduct" on human rights. Alongside the development of mechanisms to monitor human rights compliance, he assisted these bodies in evaluating the efficacy of their monitoring programs. In 1992–93, Schrage created and served as the first director of the Liaison Office on Human Rights and Environment for The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First), one of the first programs to investigate connections between the growing US movement for environmental justice and international human rights obligations.

In 1996, Schrage helped organize a partnership between three organizations; UNICEF, the ILO and Save the Children. The purpose of the partnership was to end child labor in soccer ball production in Pakistan. At that time Pakistan was the source for three of every four balls produced each year. A further project was announced to address the same problems regarding labor and production in India. From 2000-1, Schrage served as Senior Vice President of Global Affairs for Gap Inc. Schrage’s position required him to manage the social responsibility initiatives of the company. As part of this role he oversaw engagement programs for company stakeholders, which included various social investors, NGOs and government officials. Furthermore, he was tasked with auditing the working conditions for factory workers who manufactured goods for the Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic brands, through the set up and direction of a new body for Gap, entitled Gap’s Global Compliance Organization.

He led study groups on Judging Corporate Liability in the Global Economy, Leveraging the Power of the Privat Sector in the Middle East and North Africa and Beyond the Letter of the Law: The Global Impact of Compliance as a Foreign Policy Tool. His work on the application of the Alien Tort Statute was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its analyses of potential liability for multinational corporations for complicity in human rights abuses in the countries where they do business. He also advised the American Apparel Manufacturers Association in developing the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production (WRAP) Certification Program, a global program to certify apparel factories that comply with human rights standards.

Schrage holds a bachelors degree from Harvard College, a masters degree in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.