Using commercial companies for public-spirited goals isn’t entirely new, but using markets and for-profit firms to achieve traditionally noncommercial aims is attracting renewed interest. In part that may be a result of the growth of resources in the hands of the private commercial sector. It may also represent a recognition that philanthropy is quite small compared to the commercial or public realms, and that only by engaging those sectors rather than trying to fight them will sustained change be achieved. Whatever the reason, there seems to be growing interest in using philanthropy to shape or influence commercial markets, or to use commercial forms to achieve social goals. For example, the Ford Foundation made a $50 million grant to guarantee mortgage loans bought by North Carolina-based Self-Help, a nonprofit community development organization. That grant leveraged a five-year, $2 billion partnership with Fannie Mae and 22 participating private lenders and helped nearly 30,000 minority and low-income families to become homeowners. And Ford’s investment has resulted in a lasting change in the market: in 2003, Fannie Mae committed to purchase an additional $2.5 billion in loans acquired by Self-Help over the next five years.
Many similar cross-sectoral approaches have been documented by Jed Emerson, a senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, who has written extensively about blended value: how a mix of economic, social, and environmental value can be produced by investing in publicly minded organizations, whether they are for-profit or not.
In some cases, corporations are explicitly making charity a goal of their profit-making activities. Organizations like Newman’s Own and Working Assets donate some or all of their profits to educational and charitable organizations.
In other cases, for-profit and nonprofit organizations are joining forces to do cause-related marketing, where corporations support charitable causes to further their goals and to receive positive exposure. The total value of these efforts is estimated to be more than $700 million per year in the United States.
Other examples of commercial activities directed toward achieving social goals include the rise of socially minded companies like Ben & Jerry’s or the Body Shop; consumer certification programs that promote socially and environmentally responsible corporate behavior, like the fair trade coffee movement or the Forest Stewardship Council’s certification program for wood products; and socially responsible investment companies, such as Domini Funds and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.
The blurring of the lines between for-profit and nonprofit efforts is also evident in the growth of commercial enterprises with explicitly social goals. One prominent example is Meetup.com, a company that promotes grassroots activity by helping people to find others  with shared interests to create lasting, influential, local community groups that regularly meet face-to-face. Another is Rubicon Programs, a for-profit firm that operates a successful bakery and a landscaping business as part of a social service program that provides job training, mental health services, and other support services to those in need. The emergence of such groups has been facilitated by a parallel increase in the number of funders and equity investors like Investors’ Circle, Calvert Foundation, or REDF that seek “double bottom line" results by supporting enterprises that produce both social and financial benefit.
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