Corporate foundations are not only growing in number. They also increasingly fascinate researchers. Strangely, however, there is not much conceptual and empirical research on the ‘Where’, ‘Who’, ‘How’, and ‘For Whom’ of corporate foundations. Theresa Gehringer has just spent five years at the Center for Philanthropy Studies in Basel trying to fill this gap. She is our guest at the next online meeting of the Corporate Foundations Working Group.

At this session, Theresa will provide insights into current research on corporate foundations and highlight some of her own findings. In particular, she will shed light on how corporate foundations understand and define their organizational effectiveness, and how this is influenced by management practices. She will also present a study investigating how corporate foundations perceive themselves as cross-sector partnership brokers. The study examines how our organizations approach the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Speaker
Theresa Gehringer, Project Manager Arts and Culture, Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel

Moderator
Paul Castle, Head of Communications, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture

So… do come and join us! We’ll also be discussing what further issues researchers should tackle at corporate foundations – and asking how to improve knowledge transfer and communication between academia and our daily work.

Language
The workshop will run in English or German, depending on the participants

Before joining the Christoph Merian Stiftung this year, Theresa Gehringer was a research assistant at Basel’s Center for Philanthropy Studies (CEPS), studying corporate foundations. She holds a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and a Master’s in Sustainable Development. She is co-president of Switzerland’s Association of Young Foundation Experts. Theresa’s latest study appeared in VOLUNTAS, looking at hybridity in corporate foundations. (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-021-00318-w).