by Katherine Pickus

Gone are the days when businesses existed to make money and nonprofits focused only on making the world better. Now both organizations are influencing each others’ practices and finding ways to work together.

From the hallways of the UN to Fortune 500 boardrooms, new developments are taking place that are redefining how companies and nonprofit organizations are interacting and learning from one another. This disruptive change is good for everyone because it’s creating new opportunities for how to address some of society’s long-standing, complex problems, and strengthening business and nonprofits in the process.
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Going local….new opportunities exist for locally focused partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit organizations to advance creative approaches to long-standing problems.
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Companies are thinking beyond traditional philanthropy to apply their unique products, people and know-how to build local capacity and address specific issues that align with their business. One example is IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, which sends hundreds of employees to emerging markets to tackle local socioeconomic issues through information technology, while gaining cultural proficiency and increasing leadership skills.
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CARE's President and CEO Helene Gayle said it best when she used the parable of fishing to illustrate this philosophical shift: going from giving a fish, to teaching people how to fish, to looking at why there aren’t enough fish to begin with--and fixing that problem. Reflecting this approach, CARE’s poverty-alleviating efforts leverage private-sector resources and provide technical training to help people start small businesses to provide long-term sources of income.

Further growth and expansion of these types of partnerships, as well as new business and nonprofit models, hold tremendous promise for addressing longstanding, previously intractable social problems. Further cross-sector collaboration also exposes people to new ideas and expands the boundaries of what’s possible--which can help to catalyze change across an organization’s broader operations.

Perhaps the biggest benefits are the ones we can’t imagine yet. By taking a new look at what it means to be a business or a nonprofit and applying these learnings in creative new ways, we’re leveraging the unique assets of each to get the best of both worlds. This holds great potential for unlocking the ingenuity of people in countries around the world--and for opening up new avenues for innovation. Given the accelerating environmental and social challenges we’re all facing, this is exactly what is needed to keep our businesses and communities healthy in the years ahead.


http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679040/t...ing-innovation