Globalization and Grantmakers

How does globalization affect the grantmaking community’s efforts to address the pressing issues that confront the globe? We all debate what globalization means to us. We dispute what trends–good and bad–can be attributed to globalization. We ponder whether these trends are inevitable, transformable or reversible. And, we struggle with the contradiction that globalization’s many forces can simultaneously benefit and cause harm to humanity and nature.

What unites grantmakers is a shared concern about who globalization benefits and hurts. How will the structures and institutions of the global economy advance or frustrate our goals of social justice, freedom and environmental sustainability? If, as Business Week suggested in late 2000, globalization is the rise of global capitalism around the world, are we confident that this model will get us where we need to be in 10, 50 and 100 years in addressing the urgent problems that face us?

Key questions for grantmakers include:

• What are the actual and potential impacts of current globalization trends on equity, the environment and human rights?
• Who should run the global economy and what should be the role of the public in the process?
• Does more just and sustainable globalization require reformed or new structures and institutions?
• Are current trends in the global economy inevitable, or are there alternatives?

…if globalization does not work for everyone, even the least among us, ultimately it will not work for our common future…Globalization must be turned to the advantage of those who are poor and excluded. The Rockefeller Foundation, 2000 Annual Report.

Increasingly, our livelihoods, our fate and the fate of our environment rest in the hands of large, inadequately regulated transnational corporations. Ordinary citizens–not huge companies–have the right and ability to decide how best to preserve and protect our economy, our environment and the communities in which we live. Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program, 1999 Annual Report.

We will continue to support the development of broad-based coalitions that can raise…concerns to policy makers who will establish the "rules of the game" for global economic integration in the century ahead. Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, 1999 Annual Report.

The Global Greengrants Fund believes that developed nations have a special responsibility to address the problems of economic globalization and the export of environmentally unsustainable practices. Global Greengrants Fund, Mission Statement.

Addressing Globalization is key in creating social change…Globalization affects every aspect of our lives, our work and our communities. We must resist the tendency to reduce global concerns to "international work"–a specialized and separate activity. We participate in an economic, political and social global system… To address Globalization through our funding is partially about directing resources to communities outside the US. But it also involves bringing a global consciousness home, into our own communities–asking how our local struggles are connected, how US policy affects families outside our borders, what companies our monies are invested in, and how much our institutions are paying in grants. National Network of Grantmakers, Globalization: Why Should We Care? NNG Conference 2000 Program.

While globalization has existed in various forms for many centuries, the recent turn of events is very different in scale, speed, intent, control and impact; and it needs to be reversed if we are to achieve ecological sustainability… Real economic and political power has been moved away from citizen democracies and local and regional communities, and the laws they make to control development, toward global bureaucracies such as the WTO and IMF, dominated by corporate interests. This is causing unprecedented, grave consequences for the environment, social democracy and social welfare. Foundation for Deep Ecology, The First Ten Years.