Margaret Coady
Director
Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy

July 6, 2012--"Courageous Conversations" was the theme uniting the sessions throughout the agenda of the 11th annual Corporate Philanthropy Summit in New York City, hosted each year by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP). The audience of more than 200 senior corporate giving officers from the world's most influential companies, who together represent $15 billion in annual corporate contributions to charity, came ready to be inspired, have their thinking stretched, and to get their toughest questions answered by their peers.

The event kicked off with Arianna Huffington galvanizing the crowd around what she as dubbed the "Fourth Instinct" to find spiritual fulfillment and meaning in our lives. She urged us to focus on building critical mass in the service of real, lasting community solutions.

A standing-room-only session on Impact Investing challenged giving professionals to consider funding programs that create a profit and a societal benefit at the same time. Leaders from the "A Billion+Change" project provided a road map for bringing the power of skills-based employee volunteer programs to life and Michael Smith of The Case Foundation led a social media panel on how to engage employees and consumers in a two-way dialogue on the company's community commitments. Nonprofit luminaries Nancy Lublin of DoSomething.org and Dr. Helene Gayle of CARE USA delivered rapid-fire best practices regarding how companies and their nonprofit partners can work better together, stressing candor about goals and a "gut check" at the outset of any partnership to ensure that the relationship between institutions unfolds in a mutually-strategic way.

Susan McPherson
Senior Vice President/Director of Global Marketing, New York
                                       Fenton

June 12, 2012--Last week’s Corporate Philanthropy Summit, hosted in New York City by the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP), was nothing short of spectacular. Leaders from major corporations and nonprofits spoke candidly on impact investing, skills-based volunteering, communicating with stakeholders, social media and partnerships. A contagious energy surged through the Time Warner Center as participants discussed how we can work together to do good more effectively. Below are eight of my top takeaways from the two-day event:

1. Women were in top form at the summit.
At a time when so many conferences agendas are heavily weighted by male speakers, it was refreshing to see 30+ women take center stage. It’s telling about the industry as well.

2. Collaboration leads to real impact.
Many speakers stressed the importance of partnerships in solving social problems. Arianna Huffington contended that our society is moving away from competition and survival toward collaboration and meaning. Cory Booker agreed, explaining that partnerships between the public, private and nonprofit sectors are crucial to transforming cities like Newark.

Eric Nee
Managing Editor
Stanford Social Innovation Review

June 12, 2012--Collective impact—the idea that organizations from different sectors of society need to join together to tackle pressing social problems—captured people’s imagination as soon as the concept first appeared in print in the winter 2011 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. One and one-half years later the idea continues to gather momentum.

Earlier this week I attended several events—the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) 2012 Corporate Philanthropy Summit in New York City, the White House Council for Community Solutions meeting in Washington, D.C., and a roundtable on collective impact hosted by SSIR also in Washington, D.C.—where collective impact was front and center in the discussions.

In New York City more than 200 executives in charge of corporate philanthropy at many of the word’s largest corporations (including General Electric, Credit Suisse, McDonald’s, Total S.A., and IBM) gathered for two days of discussions. One of the sessions, “Making Multi-Sector Collaborations Work: Lessons from the White House Council for Community Solutions,” focused on the role that business can play in fostering collective impact solutions.