National Corporate Philanthropy Day Round-Up

Happy day-after National Corporate Philanthropy Day, FLiPs! 

For those of you scratching your heads, National Corporate Philanthropy Day (NCPD) is the day the corporate giving community uses to build awareness of corporate-community partnerships and inspire businesses across the country to engage further in philanthropy.  It’s the brainchild of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), a consortium of CEOs and Chairpersons who understand that community investment is a necessary component of any sustainable business plan. The Publisher of our sister site onPhilanthropy.com, Tom Watson, attended CECP’s Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Programs awards luncheon yesterday.  Look for his onPhilanthropy coverage of the event, whose winners were PNC, Moody’s, and Community Voice Mail, later this week.

Later in the day, the NCPD festivities continued in the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber at the United Nations.  CEOs, giving officers, and UN delegates from around the world participated in an ECOSOC special event, jointly organized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the UN Office of Partnerships, and CECP, focused on “How corporate philanthropy can contribute to advancing the Millennium Development Goals, particularly for sustainable development.”

The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and all the world’s leading development institutions.  They have galvanized unprecedented efforts to meet the needs of the world’s poorest.

onPhilanthropy.com Editor-in-Chief Susan Carey Dempsey and I donned our insta-translator earpieces as ECOSOC President Leo Merores greeted attendees in French.  Mr. Merores noted that the occasion was the first of its kind, and a great opportunity to garner corporate insights that could be woven into a larger ECOSOC session this July.  The highlights of the event were its two panels, the first focused on applying strategic philanthropy to the MDGs, and the second on leveraging leadership and strengthening partnerships through positive dialogue.  Moderators and panelists including Jeffrey Sachs; Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director, Community Affairs of Microsoft Corporation; and Christina Gold, CEO of Western Union discussed needs and opportunities with the likes of Kathy Bushkin Calvin, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the United Nations Foundation and Hilde Johnson, Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF. 

The panels sought to cover a lot of ground in little time, and although little got “done,” the conversations were important in terms of opening up a dialogue between corporate and NGO leadership.  It was particularly interesting to see delegates from places as diverse as Afghanistan and Cape Verde, Belgium and the Philippines, sharing with corporate attendees the importance of reaching the MDGs for their own nations.  It’ll be neat to see what the next step is this summer.

For more information on the MDGs, please visit http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.