The business world should create a mechanism to distribute grants to non-governmental organizations, suggests Roger Cowe
Engagement and dialogue are watchwords for responsible companies. Now, increasingly, partnerships between companies, non-governmental organizations and official agencies are seen as essential to finding ways through the thornier thickets of responsibility. This is the case both in individual sectors such as forestry and mining, and also across sectors, on sensitive issues such as human rights.
Deep relationships such as these are fraught with difficulty, though, for both sides. Campaigning NGOs worry, naturally, that getting sucked into the corporate world will blunt their campaigning edge. There is a tension between wanting to help companies improve their performance and exposing them for not performing well enough. And different skills are needed for these conflicting roles. On the corporate side, there are fears that less scrupulous NGOs could confuse these two roles, capitalizing on knowledge gained through partnership to embarrass the erstwhile partner – as reported in Ethical Performance recently (EP5, issue 5, p2).
The biggest problem, though, is surely one of resources. Even the largest NGOs do not have enough skilled people to do all the engaging and partnership work that needs to be done. A certain amount of ‘dialogue fatigue’ must already be affecting the capacity for even rudimentary engagement, yet many more companies need to be addressed, and many more issues demand partnership approaches.
Put bluntly, NGOs just don’t have enough money to invest in the depth of engagement which many companies now want. I have heard two different complaints from corporate managers: on the one hand, an NGO that wanted what amounted to a consultancy fee for working an a project; on the other, that a company wished it could give an NGO some money so the pressure group could operate more effectively.
Neither of these options is feasible. It is possible, but very dangerous, for some NGOs to accept project funding from a consortium, or jointly to develop a non-campaigning initiative. But any campaigning NGO that takes money from a company risks its reputation for fearless campaigning.
Perhaps the answer is a trust fund, endowed with corporate (and possibly even government) donations, which would make grants to appropriate partnership projects. It would allow the corporate world collectively to boost NGO resources, and that collectivity would overcome the threat to independence which goes with direct donations. A grant-making trust would also provide a suitable intermediary which could ensure that the money was spent on activities by organizations that supported partnership principles.
It wouldn’t be easy to persuade hard-pressed businesses to part with money for these purposes. But the alternative may be to limp along with inadequate partnerships.
Roger Cowe is a business journalist specializing in corporate social responsibility.
He is editor of No Scruples? published by Spiro Press