Reinventing Strategic Philanthropy: the sustainable organization of voluntary action for impact

Lucas Meijs

ERIM Inaugural Address Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Abstract: Philanthropic organizations have recently started to focus on how to invest their resources in a way that will really make a difference to society. Strategic philanthropy is the new concept for voluntary action for the public good to create a valuable sustainable impact! This inaugural address presents the future research agenda of the Erasmus Centre for Strategic Philanthropy and focuses on three (strategic) challenges faced by philanthropic organizations: 1) sustaining philanthropic commitment, 2) selecting and executing programmes, and 3) examining the role of management and boards. These are the linking pin between the first two challenges. Governance, accountability and organizational effectiveness are essential for management and boards of individual organizations and for the philanthropic sector as a whole. In the first strategic challenge, philanthropic commitment is seen as a natural resource and Ostrom’s (1990) eight design principles for managing ‘common pool resources’ are applied to philanthropic commitment. The second strategic challenge focuses on the results chain for programme management while the role of management and boards is analyzed from the perspective of ‘resource exchange partnerships’ in the third challenge. Cooperation, especially with the business world, is presented as essential for creating sustainable impact in society.

Keywords: boards; common pool management; corporate social responsibility; governance; impact; nongovernmental organizations; nonprofit organizations; partnerships; strategic philanthropy; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F23 G23 M M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-02-19
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/17833/EIA-2010-042-ORG.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:euriar:17833

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Inaugural Address Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).