Thursday, March 23, 2006
Uncommon Partners: The Power of Foundation and Corporation Collaboration
Introduction
Foundations and corporations seem to exist in different worlds, rarely acting in concert. Foundations operate primarily within civil society, while corporations function within a competitive global marketplace. Yet through their activities, corporations exert a powerful and direct impact on many of the social and environmental issues that foundations seek to influence through their grants.
Conversely, foundations fund and work in close partnership with many civil society organizations and NGOs that corporations support – in addition, of course, to those that corporations oppose. In the US, for example, corporate donations add up to nearly 50 cents for every dollar in foundation grants.1 Moreover, corporations possess many of the tools that are essential components of social and environmental solutions – expertise in economic development, scientific and medical research, logistics, technology, and so on. These resources are often overlooked, however, when foundations develop their theories of change by working solely with civil society organizations.
To say that foundations and corporations have overlapping interests is not to pretend that their interests are always aligned – in fact, they are at times opposed. But in situations where they do have common interests, such as in economic development for underserved regions, it is through a careful understanding of their complementary goals and resources that effective partnerships can be built. It is our contention that deliberately leveraging the combined capabilities of foundations and corporations will enable far more powerful solutions to social problems than either sector could achieve independently.
Not all foundations will be willing to partner with corporations, and many corporations fail to consider the economic, social and environmental consequences of their actions. Yet there is a growing cohort of companies that take corporate responsibility very seriously. Many of these companies go well beyond managing their own responsibilities and have affirmatively committed themselves to solving global problems and helping to reach the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. It is this elite group of corporations that will be most willing to partner with foundations, and it is to them that this paper is directed.
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