Abstract
In the United States, corporate foundations are seen as part of the foundation sector and of the nonprofit sector more generally. They began to emerge after World War II. In the early years, corporate philanthropy was purposely detached from business interests, a trend that changed staring in the 1980s. Although there are no regulations targeted specifically toward corporate foundations in the United States, they are subject to regulations as private foundations by tax authorities. According to the Foundation Center, as of 2014, about 3 percent of American foundations were corporate foundations (2521 out of 86,726). One estimate suggests that 40 percent of corporations in America have a corporate foundation. They tend to give locally, to relatively uncontroversial causes, and to many grantees—such a strategy creates goodwill from the community, a better trained workforce, and a loyal customer base. Ironically, as corporate foundation officials are pressured to maintain a strategic connection to the parent corporation, they often struggle to find support for the foundation’s activities from their peers inside the parent corporation. This tension between serving the greater good and advancing the interests of the corporation is a challenge that no other type of foundation is facing.
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Notes
- 1.
The National Center for Charitable Statistics compiled this information. For the exact numbers, please see http://nccsweb.urban.org/nonprofit-overview.php
- 2.
The Boston Review (2013) published a forum of prominent scholars on the place of foundations in a democratic system, available at http://bostonreview.net/forum/foundations-philanthropy-democracy (accessed 10 February 2019). The arguments discussed above mirror some of the points raised by these scholars.
- 3.
Again, I invite readers to read the nuanced arguments presented by the scholars in the Boston Review forum (available at http://bostonreview.net/forum/foundations-philanthropy-democracy) to get a better sense of the overall debate.
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Tremblay-Boire, J. (2020). Corporate Foundations in the United States. In: Roza, L., Bethmann, S., Meijs, L., von Schnurbein, G. (eds) Handbook on Corporate Foundations. Nonprofit and Civil Society Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25759-0_6
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