Many Philippine firms, particularly publicly listed ones, have recently started to undertake corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects, some even embedding CSR in their strategies.
The reasons for these actions range from enhancing the firms’ corporate image and reputation, to solidifying long-term investors’ confidence and gaining long-term customer loyalty as the new and emerging breed of customers and the more savvy long-term investors want to deal with and patronize only reputable, trustworthy, and ethical companies.
Even well-sought after corporate talents are starting to discriminate against unethical and untrustworthy firms, and are attracted to work only for firms that support integrity and value-laden philosophies.
CSR activities include donating to charities, aiding and contributing after major disasters, and raising funds for communities or popular social causes such as Bantay-Bata and the Pasig River clean-up project.
Archie Carroll of the University of Georgia defines corporate social responsibility as a firm’s obligations to its stakeholders, who include not only the owners/investors but also the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities surrounding the business in four responsibility areas: legal, economic, ethical, and philanthropic or human and community welfare.
Some enlightened Philippine firms (e.g., Ayala, Shell, and ABS-CBN) have collaborated with nonprofit organizations in their CSR initiatives. These firms have graduated from what Harvard Business School’s James Austin, in his article “The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed through Strategic Alliances,” calls transactional collaboration, where the resource flow shifts from unilateral (one-way) to bilateral (two-way), involving what Bradley Googins of the Catholic University of Milan and Steven Rochlin, Senior Fellow at US Chamber of Commerce Foundation Corporate Citizenship Center, call “an explicit exchange of resources and reciprocal value creation.”
Many Philippine firms are still in the philanthropic collaboration, where the resources, either cash or goods, flow from the donor (the firm) to a recipient (the nonprofit organization). However, a more integrative approach to CSR has evolved over the past few years. This approach is called Cross-Sector Social Partnership (CSSP).
Several key authorities on CSSP offer varying definitions.
John Selsky of the Institute for Washington’s Future, and Barbara Parker of the Albers School of Business & Economics, Seattle University, define CSSP as cross-sector projects formed explicitly to address social issues and causes that actively engage partners to undertake projects jointly either as transactional, short-term, constrained, and largely self-interest oriented, or integrative, developmental, long-term, open-ended, and largely common-interest oriented such as health care, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection. John Bryson, Barbara Crosby, and Melissa Stone, all of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, describe CSSP as the linking or sharing of information, resources, activities, or capabilities by organizations in two or more sectors to jointly achieve an outcome that could not be achieved by organizations in one sector. These cross-sectors are as follows: business-government, business-nonprofits, government-nonprofits, and business-government-nonprofit.
These two definitions have the following in common: a) a joint partnership between organizations in two or more sectors; b) addressing complex social issues; c) using partners’ unique expertise; and; d) employing Austin’s four-stage Collaboration Continuum of Philanthropic Collaboration, Transactional Collaboration, Integrative Collaboration, and Transformational Collaboration.
Why CSSP? Complex problems such as environmental degradation, poverty, and transportation cannot be adequately addressed by organizations from only one sector and with limited expertise, but rather, by organizations in cross-sectors where the combined expertise can result in synergistic solutions.
This article was taken from here.