Corporate foundations as vehicles for sustainable development: How do corporate foundations work with parent companies to achieve sustainability?

Sustainability is currently a priority for businesses all over the world. Usually created with a philanthropic purpose, corporate foundations have become actors that support companies achieving their sustainability strategies. In this chapter, we explore the role that a corporate foundation takes when helping their parent company achieve its sustainability strategy. To do so, we have conceptualized the corporate foundation as a hybrid organization that combines business and philanthropic logic and investigate how actors work to help define and deploy a sustainability strategy. We uncover three different roles for corporate foundations and three types of work mobilized by actors from businesses and corporate foundations.