The Foundations of Business

I am particularly pleased with this exclusive thought-leadership piece, because I helped to undertake the background research that provides the bedrock of the discussion and conclusions, during my placement with Corporate Citizenship over the summer of 2012.

TheFoundations of Business is the most recently released publication by Corporate Citizenship. It gives a unique insight into the current workings of corporate foundations in England and Wales, which can be loosely defined as distinct legal entities that contribute to community causes on a company’s behalf. Yes, they are independent from the companies that provisionally fund them, but there are varying degrees of company and foundation integration to be found, with equally varying degrees of employee involvement in activities such as fundraising and volunteering.

In my capacity as researcher, I was lucky enough to work with Amanda Jordan OBE to help produce this piece using the Charity Commission database, a survey and in-depth interviews with the foundations of Zurich, Sodexo as well as the Association of Charitable Foundations.

Since the last Corporate Citizenship publication into corporate foundations in 2006, the numbers of such foundations in England and Wales has actually grown, despite the economic downturn.

During my research I was both astonished and overjoyed to see that a large part of the new corporate foundations established since 2006 were in the fashion sector. Not only that, but this was an entirely new sector to realise the benefits of corporate foundations, with clothing retailers such as Burberry (2008), Primark (2008), White Stuff (2010) and Jimmy Choo (2011) all establishing foundations in recent years.

An area for future improvement across corporate foundations in all industry sectors, however, was shown to be impact assessment. This was demonstrated when a shocking 42% of survey respondents from corporate foundations said that they do not undertake any form of impact assessment.

This publication is focused upon corporate foundations based in the UK, although some of them had additional global operations. With great potential to take this research further, there are some brief European comparisons made at the end and there may be an American perspective brought out in the future.

Corporate foundations are certainly valuable contributors to social good and this research is really only the start of what is to come within this expanding sector. A great piece of thought-leadership- keep up the good work guys and girls!