Giving Compass' Take:

• The authors explain the factors behind the success of transformational corporate-NGO partnerships, using NGO CARE USA and agricultural company Cargill, as shining examples of their work in India. 

• How can these partnerships strengthen commitments to the SDGs?

• Read about how to achieve greater impact through strategic partnerships. 

What does it take to make a partnership bold, ambitious, and long-term? How can we strengthen global partnerships—the primary aim of Sustainable Development Goal 17—to create transformational change?

The reality is that true partnerships—ones that are balanced in power and influence, long-term, and far-reaching—are rare and hard to build. Many fail, and many others remain narrow and transactional, with one partner becoming more akin to a supplier than a partner.

The international NGO CARE USA and the global food and agriculture company Cargill have been partnering for more than 50 years—long before any of the authors of this piece began working for our respective organizations.  The relationship continued along the same philanthropic lines until, in the mid-2000s, former CARE CEO Peter Bell began to ask how the two organizations could better share their capabilities and benefit even more from their relationship, beyond money.

The result was the launch of a focused, strategic partnership in 2008. With an initial 5-year commitment of $10 million from Cargill, the organizations started the Rural Development Initiative to support rural agricultural communities. The commitment was extended in 2013 and 2016, and today the partnership specifically aims to improve food and nutrition security, increase farmer productivity, create greater access to markets, and build local communities’ resilience.

Based on more than a dozen in-depth interviews with people from both CARE and Cargill who have been intimately involved in the partnership’s evolution over the past 10 years, we identified a number of factors that commonly led to success.

  1. Ambitious Shared Purpose
  2. A Drive for Mutual Value
  3.  Co-Creation and Continuous Improvement
  4. Authentic Internal Communication
  5. Shared External Engagement

Transformational partnerships offer the exciting prospect of scale and lasting impact, and the capacity to tackle the complex, global challenges we face today.

Read the full article about transformational corporate-NGO partnerships by Zahid Torres-Rahman, Michelle Grogg, & Marcela Hahn at Stanford Social Innovation Review