To Confront or Collaborate
Grantmakers and grantees point out that there are three principal motivators for companies to take up a social agenda: values, strategy, and the pressure of regulation or litigation, either actual or threatened. “If you get all three of those running at the same time,” says one, “then you’ve got a chance to get something that lasts from one business cycle to the next. If it’s only one, first, it’s hard to make the move happen and, second, when it does happen, it’s not clear it’s going to be sustained over time. And it’s probably not going to get to scale.”
Yet grantmakers who have used a mix of strategies say that finding the right balance is likely to be an iterative process. “By building best practice, to some extent we begin to change our idea of the possible,” suggests one experienced grantmaker. “Hopefully we establish what can be done profitably and thereby, through practice, identify what needs to be regulated, or what needs to be subsidized, in order to induce the desired business behavior.”
Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.
This takeaway was derived from Working with the Business Sector.
