Are corporate-nonprofit partnerships always a good thing?
The nonprofit world is now replete with big-name corporate partnerships. Visit the website of any large nonprofit and you’ll see the logos of prominent Fortune 500 companies plastered all over their “Partners” page. And why not? Corporations provide large, reliable donations and have all sorts of in-kind goodies to contribute — a nonprofit would be insane to not take them up on their offers.
But at what point do these partnerships become detrimental to a nonprofit’s mission?
Let’s not forget — nonprofits exist to address, and hopefully solve, a social or environmental problem. That’s it, that’s their sole function. Corporations, on the other hand, exist to generate profit and often are the primary drivers of social and environmental problems. Furthermore, corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments exist, almost exclusively, to distract the public from that latter fact. And while the truth of this statement is certainly a matter of degrees — companies do have varying levels of social conscientiousness,— by and large their social and environmental priorities are relegated far down the list, despite what their flashy sustainability websites may have you believe.
If we take it as true that CSR is often utilized by a company to distract and prevent the public from digging around to expose the sausage-making, and we acknowledge that nonprofit partnerships are now a key pillar of many CSR strategies, it seems to me that nonprofits have a duty to ask themselves whether they are actually contributing — albeit indirectly and incrementally — to the very problem they are working to solve. Are they, by giving some of the biggest transgressors something to hide behind, helping perpetuate the problem?
To be clear, I do not disapprove of these relationships at all, nor do I fault nonprofits for entering into them. I am simply surprised at how little they seem to be considered in this way, even when a nonprofit is taking money from a company that appears to be in direct opposition to its mission.
Take, for example, the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful, whose mission is “to inspire and educate people to take action every day to improve and beautify their community environment.” Keep America Beautiful does all sorts of fantastic work — the Great American Cleanup, National Planting Day, the Recycle-Bowl, etc. — all in the name of creating a cleaner and healthier America. We can all agree these are great initiatives, and that Keep America Beautiful is making a worthwhile effort.
Navigate to their corporate partner page and you immediately see some big names, among them Dow Chemical, Nestle, and — perhaps the largest polluter you’ve never heard of — Alcoa. Let’s take a look at just these three.
Just recently, Dow asked the Trump administration to ignore government research indicating that a group of its commonly used pesticides are harmful to 1,800 endangered and critically threatened animal species. This shouldn’t be surprising, of course; Dow Chemical has a decades-long history of misbehavior and a rap-sheet that includes Agent Orange, complicity in the Bhopal cover-up, and withholding information from the EPA. Alcoa, a global leader in the production of aluminum, is one of only 22 companies that the Center for Public Integrity identifies as a “super-polluter” — i.e. those companies that are ranked in the top 100 for both “toxic” and “greenhouse” pollution. Factor in the deforestation caused by its mines in the Amazon — which, lest we forget, counts as “America” — and Alcoa might be one of the companies most contributing to “Keeping America Dirty.”
And then there’s Nestle, whose name has become synonymous with environmental irresponsibility. This would be an hour-long read if we were to list its transgressions, but — to name a few — manufactured demand and the proliferation of plastic water bottles, especially through cheap distribution in poor countries; pumping clean water out of crisis-ridden Flint and drought-stricken California; over-extraction of water; use of unsustainable palm oil; passing off horse meat as beef; deforestation in Indonesia. Okay, I’m out of breath — but the point is they’re hardly environmental stewards.
Are [nonprofits], by giving some of the biggest transgressors something to hide behind, helping perpetuate the problem?
Admittedly, Keep America Beautiful may not be a great example because it actually started as a coalition of companies, but we could go through this exercise for a whole host of nonprofits and find plenty of similar examples.
The important thing for nonprofits to think about, I suppose, is the extent to which these sorts of partnerships help corporations keep the public at bay. We all know that having a public-facing CSR department is now a non-negotiable for companies, but whether these partnerships play a role in allowing corporations to continue their misdeeds relatively unimpeded is quite difficult to tease out.
If — and that’s a big “if” — these partnerships do play a significant part in a corporation’s ability to hide, then nonprofits need to seriously think about the ways in which a corporate partner’s pattern of behavior is in direct opposition to their own mission and goals. If they are misaligned, then that partnership could actually move the needle in the other direction.
Furthermore, if all the nonprofits working in a particular space agreed that certain corporations acted in ways detrimental to their missions and therefore refused to partner with them, might that end up being integral to forcing some companies to actually change their behavior?
