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Promoting Global Giving – an Overview focus on: getting global giving going p 21 have drawn a great deal of attention to global Promoting global problems. The UN Millennium Development Goals, 1 announced in 2000, have also helped social investors giving an overview focus on problems in need of global attention. In addition to wealthy individuals, other relatively new global donors include multinational corpora- Adele Simmons and Dan Nielsen Global philanthropy, or tions. At times driven not by altruism but by the global social investing, desire for competitive advantage, they have donated is expanding rapidly, a byproduct of the world’s increasingly mobile money and products and adopted environmentally workforce, the explosion of wealth in the 1990s, and improvements and socially responsible business practices. Service or- in telecommunications. This new group of investors is not found ganizations have also had a big impact on the global solely in the upper class of industrialized nations. In Brazil, stage, sometimes by pooling resources. The Rotary India, the Philippines and Mexico, for example, individuals Club’s 20-year, $600 million campaign to eradicate po- are increasingly contributing to social causes within their own lio, for example, drew on millions of individual gifts. countries. According to a recent study by the Aga Khan Foundation, Support and development giving by Pakistanis is four times the amount of foreign aid that The recent increase in global philanthropy has been Pakistan receives.2 supported by new mechanisms for social investment Guest editor for the A ‘global philanthropy infrastructure’ is now in place Alliance special feature and improvements in infrastructure. Sensing the on ‘Getting global giving – organizations and networks that support and going’ potential to bring individual donors to the table, strengthen global giving. This article will examine various foundations, including Mott, Ford, Hewlett, that infrastructure, highlight recent trends and Rockefeller, Kellogg, Aga Khan, and Bertelsmann, developments, and discuss some of the issues that have invested in promoting global philanthropy. need to be addressed to significantly increase the They have established local organizations that sup- effectiveness and scale of global giving. port philanthropy, offered training programmes for For the purposes of this issue, we’ve defined global global donors, and funded research as well as confer- philanthropy as the use of financial and other ences designed to bring donors together. Adele Simmons is President of the Global resources to target underdevelopment around the Philanthropy Partnership The oldest donor support organization is the US- and Senior Adviser of the world. This includes investments travelling over World Economic Forum. based Council on Foundations, set up 55 years ago. She is also a member borders (donors in wealthier nations investing in of the Board of the The Council promotes global social investment by Synergos Institute. She poorer countries) and funds travelling within borders was President of the providing educational and informational resources MacArthur Foundation where the investors’ goal is increasing the prosperity from 1989 to 1999. (particularly on the legal issues involved in interna- She can be contacted at of an underdeveloped region or group of people. For adelesimmons@ tional grantmaking) and by lobbying for the reform mindspring.com several decades, this sort of philanthropy was the of US Treasury Department guidelines on interna- Dan Nielsen is Executive province of a small number of large foundations, but Director of the Global tional giving. Philanthropy today, thanks to the well-publicized commitments Partnership. He can be contacted at of Stephan Schmidheiny, George Soros, Ted Turner The European Foundation Centre (EFC), established dan.nielsen@global- philanthropy.org and Bill Gates, individual global giving is receiving a in 1989, supports a number of funders’ networks that great deal of attention. enable funders to exchange ideas and collaborate on projects in specific regions of the world and Schmidheiny created the AVINA Foundation in 1994 specific areas of work. Eighteen months ago, the EFC to support the work of civil society groups working on launched Europe in the World (EitW), a campaign to 1 This article draws sustainable development in Latin America. Soros has, heavily on Paula encourage European foundations to devote at least Johnson, Steve Johnson among other causes, supported education and civil and Andrew Kingman 5 per cent of their spending to initiatives outside (2004) Promoting society in Russia and Eastern Europe following the Philanthropy: Global Europe or programmes with a global dimension. challenges and approaches, end of the Cold War. Turner, through the United prepared for the Ninety foundations have already joined. The Mexi- International Network Nations Foundation, and Gates, through his founda- for Strategic can Center for Philanthropy (CEMEFI), established in Philanthropy. tion’s work to reduce AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, 1988, promotes social responsibility throughout 2 Aga Khan have filled gaps left by government and multilateral Development Network Mexican society, fostering partnerships between (2000) Philanthropy in organizations (the US Government and the World Pakistan: A report of the corporations, foundations and NGOs. It now has over Initiative on Indigenous Health Organization, to name two). With their focus Philanthropy Islamabad, 400 members. ୴ Pakistan. on global issues, the four men and their foundations Alliance Volume 9 Number 4 December 2004 p 22 focus on: getting global giving going Promoting global giving – an overview That old guard has now been joined by other organi- In addition, there are established players in the zations supporting global donors. In the US, South. Philippine Business for Social Progress has Grantmakers Without Borders, now four years old, been working since 1970 to promote business sector was established to help individual funders and small involvement in social development in the Philip- and mid-sized foundations support work leading to pines,3 while Partners in Change, spun off from social change in the developing world. Hispanics in ActionAid India in 1995, works with Indian compa- Philanthropy, also a youth in the field, works to in- nies. But one of the best known is Ethos Institute, crease resources for Latin American civil society and only six years old, the premier CSR organization in Latino groups in the US. GIFE (Group of Institutions, Brazil, with over 900 corporate members. As a group, Foundations and Enterprises) in Brazil and the South- they account for 30 per cent of Brazil’s GDP. Ethos, ern African Grantmakers Association, both of which which works on projects with institutions from all foster partnerships and provide information about over the globe, is in the process of developing a CSR best practices, will celebrate their tenth birthdays in self-appraisal toolkit for use by the corporate sector. 2005. The 11-year-old Asia Pacific Philanthropy Con- Networks and peer exchanges sortium (APPC) seeks to develop and strengthen Increasingly, global donors want to develop more philanthropy and the social sector in the Asia Pacific strategic and effective means of carrying out their region; it has supported projects that explore regula- philanthropic activities. In response, a number of tory and governance issues, resource mobilization, organizations have emerged that seek to provide and trends in contemporary Asian philanthropy. donors with a safe space to learn from each other, All these organizations are members of Worldwide where they can talk about their work as well as about Initiatives for Grantmaker Support (WINGS), a net- more personal issues related to family, wealth and work of grantmaker support organizations, currently giving. These networks are relatively new. The Global housed at the EFC in Brussels. Philanthropy Forum in northern California held its Corporate giving first annual conference, attended by over 300 donors, in 2002. The following year, the Chicago Global As already mentioned, corporate social responsibility Donors Network began hosting meetings and work- (CSR) comes in many forms. Merck, for example, has shops to educate and encourage local international made a commitment to donate mectizan, the drug donors. Also in 2003, the World Economic Forum set that prevents riverblindness, in perpetuity. The com- up a Foundation Leaders Advisory Group to provide pany hopes that the disease can be eradicated by 2007. advice about how the Forum can best support its PricewaterhouseCoopers is sending teams of em- members who are donors and increase effective ployees to developing countries to work with NGOs social investing. The World Economic Forum has on a pro bono basis on issues such as land mine erad- provided opportunities for donors to meet and share ication and the prevention of AIDS in Uganda. TPG, experiences at its last seven annual meetings. the Dutch express mail company, has formed a five- year partnership with the World Food Programme to Another type of peer network is the giving circle (see help get food to children. p50) where groups of donors pool funds to support action on a specific issue. The Synergos Institute’s Other corporations have established their own foun- Global Philanthropists Circle (GPC) gives individuals dations. The NIKE Foundation contributes to the and families the opportunity to network and find education of girls, Unilever is supporting work on partners for collaboration.
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