Creating Grassroots Social Impact In Corporate America

By Sam Caplan

Corporate culture tends to be hierarchical. So, businesses are an unlikely place for participatory practices and movement-building to flourish. But traditional business frameworks don’t work well when it comes to employee engagement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. It’s time to reconsider how power is defined, shared, and deployed in support of social impact goals. That’s the only way we’ll unlock the true potential of these efforts. 

New Power, a concept defined by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, describes the shift from older, hierarchical power structures to more open, participatory, and decentralized forms of influence. The authors describe how power is shifting to center on mobilizing people, crowdsourcing ideas, and fostering collaboration. Old power is held by a few and controlled tightly, while new power is more like a current, spreading quickly and empowering many. 

CSR programs often include grants, employee giving, and volunteerism. They have traditionally been managed from the top down, with few opportunities for employees to play a meaningful or participative role in developing program strategy and defining its purpose. It’s the definition of old power, and the results haven’t been great.

Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP) reports the average employee volunteer participation rate in 2022 was just 19.8%. Only 19.4% of employees participated in their employer’s matching gift program. These numbers aren’t outliers. Participation rates haven’t changed much during the past decade, often bobbling somewhere between 20% and 30%.

Volunteering and giving initiatives are often referred to as employee engagement programs, and are intended to foster a strong sense of loyalty and values alignment with the company. The idea is for corporations and employees to work together toward a common social impact goal, while strengthening relationships and enhancing performance. But employees often don’t engage when they don’t feel that they have a voice to help shape those goals. With only 20% of employees participating, the programs don’t deliver value at the scale businesses expect.

Corporate purpose programs must embrace new power. Employees should be encouraged to take the reins and build their own corporate purpose movement. By yielding more agency and power to employees, corporations can both increase engagement and achieve far greater social impact in their communities.

This shift towards new power is already happening inside many companies. A leading example is employee resource groups (ERGs). These groups tend to form around shared interests or experiences, often related to aspects like race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or other cultural identities. In the past, they served as a way for employees to communicate issues or concerns with corporate leadership. Today, they often serve to promote equity and inclusion, provide professional development, and increase employee engagement. 

Many ERGs already play an influential role in their corporate purpose programs by creating fundraisers for local charities, hosting volunteer opportunities, and informing the selection of corporate grantees. At the Association for Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP) annual 2024 conference, representatives from KPMG, Walmart, and Gilead Sciences each described how ERGs and similar affinity groups are leading and informing CSR programming through various participatory practices.

Ceding some power and decision making to ERGs can be as simple as allowing them to develop relationships with local nonprofits, empowering them to create volunteering and fundraising events that are promoted throughout the company, and providing them with funding to make grants or donations to nonprofits.

Another powerful way to encourage employees to lead and influence CSR programming is by creating a volunteer leader network, where employees are trained on how to effectively host and lead corporate volunteering events. Employees realize a deeper sense of engagement as they are given opportunities for CSR leadership. And as an added bonus, corporations can more effectively scale their programs without having to increase staff (providing time and resources, however, is a critical component for success). 

At the individual employee level, companies can empower employees by allowing them to distribute corporate dollars directly to nonprofits. This typically occurs when a company matches employee donations to a nonprofit. A more progressive approach is to allocate funding for employees to donate without requiring them to make a donation. These credit grants or incentives build trust and engagement with employees.

Movement Building

While it’s heartening to see many corporations make the shift to participatory practices and greater employee involvement, there’s still a way to go before a true employee-led social purpose movement arrives.

Movements are created when people come together around a shared purpose or cause that feels personal to each of them. Employees care deeply about the communities where they live and work, and are often willing to contribute their time and money to address social challenges. But they prefer to do this work on their own terms, rather than at the behest of management. 

Corporations must create the conditions for positive social movements to occur organically. For company leaders, this approach can feel unfamiliar. It often requires taking a step back and ceding control. It can be uncomfortable at times. But the potential upside is huge. When employees are given the trust, opportunity, and tools to lead social impact in a self-determined manner they will undoubtedly achieve more than when given limited options or corporate-directed choices. And they will create the grassroots momentum social impact programs need to thrive. 

The companies that get this right will see engagement and participation skyrocket. Social impact will become a core part of their brand identity and employee experience. The key is understanding that corporate social responsibility belongs to employees more than anyone else. Provide them tools, resources, opportunities, and trust and be willing to follow their lead.

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Sam Caplan, vice president of Social Impact at social impact platform Submittable.