Frequently Asked Questions

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.

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.

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.

To foster cross-sectoral engagement and understanding to counter undue demonization, and advance genuine solutions, we offer a number of deliverables.

• Inventory and prioritize corporate and NGO stakeholders and their chains of influence by areas of focus.
• Map their Relationships
• Facilitated strategic direct and indirect introductions and engagements between companies, NGOs, funders, etc.
• Provide Trainings, Briefings, and Assessments to help companies and NGOs build capacity for constructive engagement.
• Convene one-on-one and multi-stakeholder meetings.

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.

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:

• Bolder: We take on complex problems and deliver positive results even when engaging self-described "radical" activists with deep distrust or enmity toward global companies.
• More Strategic: We are more skilled at understanding the comprehensive stakeholder landscape - corporate, NGO, academic, government, opinion leaders, SRIs, and others - and developing a set of steps stakeholders support that that can solve the systemic problem.
• More Pragmatic: We design tailored actionable plans that fit each specific situation and set of stakeholders. We do not let the perfect be the enemy of the possible - and are dedicated to insuring that the possible becomes reality.
• Credible and Trustworthy: Our staff comes from high levels in both the business and NGO communities, and we maintain extensive relationships on all sides. NGOs often trust us as intermediaries that help them communicate and engage more effectively with companies. They know we are as committed to solutions as they are, and are better able to accept constructive criticism from us than from either competing NGOs or perceived corporate adversaries. In turn, companies trust us because we seek to advance market-based solutions that create an equal competitive landscape among competitors.
• Effective: As a third-party intermediary, we are better at pinpointing root causes, uniting widely divergent interests, and leveraging their combined power to drive solutions.
• Highly Experienced: With well over two decades of successfully resolving complex corporate-NGO conflicts, and forging odd-bedfellow alliances to save forests, recycle resources, promote human rights, and cut off funding for violence against people and the planet.

Yes. Future 500 helps companies and NGO engage each other more strategically, skillfully, and successfully, by providing key knowledge, training, contacts, and strategies.