Has your company or corporate foundation explored international grant making? If so, did you realize you weren’t sure how to go about getting started? Were you concerned about the risk to your business, or did words such as “equivalency determination” stop you in your tracks?

You are not alone.

In June 2020, a manufacturing company headquartered in the U.S. experienced this exact dilemma when the COVID-19 pandemic took a huge toll on their employees and facilities across North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Committed to ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of their communities, the company’s CSR team went to work developing a strategy to provide grants to charities working on COVID-19 relief in those locations.

However, in order to successfully do this, the company would need to facilitate distributions to multiple different charities around the world while ensuring they were not putting their business at risk. Recognizing that this would be a significant challenge for their CSR team, the company reached out to Global Impact to help streamline their approach.

Global Impact is in a unique position: As a registered charity, we are able to accept grant funding from a variety of sources, including corporations and corporate foundations; as a philanthropic intermediary, we have more than 60 years of experience distributing charitable funds to organizations around the world. Utilizing this experience, the company made one contribution to Global Impact for the grants. From there, the Global Impact team collected paperwork from the grantees, vetted each organization and went to work distributing a total of $50 million in grants ranging in size from $5,000 to $48 million to the selected charities around the world.

The results 
By leveraging Global Impact’s 65-year history of distributing funds around the world, this company was able to:

Distribute $50 million to more than 45 charities around the world, including: 

  • 6 in Europe and the Middle East
  • 5 in Asia
  • 12 in South America
  • 22 in North America

Make grant contributions to provide much-needed COVID-19 relief supplies for the communities where their employees live and work, including:

  • Purchasing PPE for health professionals in hospitals in Brazil and Italy.
  • Contributing to COVID-19 vaccine development efforts in Latin America and elsewhere around the word.
  • Supplying food baskets, clothing and other necessary supplies to the underserved populations in the U.S. that are most affected by the pandemic.

This partnership is just one recent example of how Global Impact has supported international grantmaking. If this sounds like an option your company would like to explore, we would be happy to discuss how you can leverage our expertise to vet charities, distribute funding and collect impact metrics – allowing you to maintain stability at your company while also helping those in need around the world.

Global Impact can support your company in other ways too – check out our services for corporations. Contact us today to explore how Global Impact can enhance your CSR strategy for maximum impact.