| Q: | What is Future 500? |
| A: |
Future 500 forges relationships that matter between the world's best-known companies and stakeholder opinion leaders. Founded in December 1995 in Aspen, Colorado, Future 500 is a 501c3 non-profit organization based in San Francisco, with affiliate offices in Beijing and Tokyo, who collectively employ 30 professionals and maintain a network of 20 on-call correspondents - stakeholder professionals who can track and engage issues and groups almost anywhere they arise. Our core competence is corporate-NGO stakeholder engagement with a particular expertise in corporate-NGO conflict. We are adept at shifting the focus of these conflicts away from demonization toward collaborative solutions that get to the root cause of climate, water, resource, and labor/human rights challenges. |
| Q: | Who is a partner? How are you funded? |
| A: |
Our revenue comes from a combination of dues and service payments from over 100 corporate partners across three regions, and grants from government and public foundations. View our current partners page. |
| Q: | What does Future 500 do? |
| A: |
We foster cross-sectoral engagement, link together strategically-selected companies and NGOs, and turn their focus away from cross-demonization and toward systemic solutions in our four program areas: Climate, Water, Recycling, and Labor. We do this by leveraging our extensive and ever growing network, using a systematic but readily adaptable engagement approach that is more effective at identifying and aligning areas of common ground between corporations and stakeholder influentials. To break the cycle of demonization, we follow a set of steps that eliminate the emotional and institutional value of demonization. We turn ideological stakeholders toward the deeper systemic causes of the problems - and focus them on genuine solutions. Our approach reduces the intensity of conflict to open minds to solutions, and can end them over the course of several months. To create better strategies for stakeholder engagement, we follow a systematic but adaptable methodology that involves inventorying and prioritizing a corporate and NGO stakeholders, mapping their relationships, and identifying the most strategic handful of stakeholders to engage, and outline the steps necessary to cultivate a genuine, constructive relationship with them. To build professional capacity in stakeholder engagement, we provide hands-on training and role-playing intensives, document best practices, and illustrate common mistakes. We often facilitate meetings to assist companies and NGOs with challenging engagements. |
| Q: | What are your deliverables? |
| A: |
To foster cross-sectoral engagement and understanding to counter undue demonization, and advance genuine solutions, we offer a number of deliverables.
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| Q: | Aren't anti-corporate "Name Blame and Shame" campaigns inevitable? Isn't responding to them pointless - even counterproductive? |
| A: |
No - there are better solutions, for business, activists, and individuals. "Name Blame and Shame" campaigns can be powerful agents to drive media and dollars to an important issue. As the Wall Street Journal reports, "With a laptop, a website, and an email address, you can wreak havoc on a giant multinational." But many anti-corporate campaigns often fail to advance systemic solutions. By suggesting a complex problem is simply the work of an evil enemy - generally a big corporation and its executives - the campaigns often advance band-aid solutions, foster animosity, and hinder potential for the trust needed to foster the collaboration required to identify and advance systemic solutions. |
| Q: | Others provide "stakeholder engagement." How is Future 500 different? |
| A: |
Future 500 is different in several ways. Many consultancies offer "stakeholder-engagement-in-a-box" - standardized plans to bring you together with relatively standardized sets of stakeholders in relatively standardized multi-stakeholder processes, that yield unimpressive results. Future 500 differs by being:
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| Q: | Shouldn't companies do their own stakeholder engagement - not rely on third parties? |
| A: |
Yes. Future 500 helps companies and NGO engage each other more strategically, skillfully, and successfully, by providing key knowledge, training, contacts, and strategies. |
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