Nicole Bögelein

Sind Stiftungen Soziale Investoren? Zur Anwendbarkeit eines ökonomischen Begriffs auf die Tätigkeit gemeinnütziger europäischer Stiftungen

Der Begriff „Investition“ entstammt dem Bereich der Okonomie. Von Investitionen ist in einem betriebswirtschaftlichen Kontext dann die Rede, wenn es um die Anschaffung von Produktionsmitteln oder um Geldanlagen mit dem Ziel der Generierung finanzieller Gewinne geht. Stiftungen hingegen engagieren sich mit eigenen Projekten oder finanziellen Transfers fur das Gemeinwohl. Auf den ersten Blick scheinen Stiftungen also alles andere als klassische Investoren zu sein. Inwiefern lasst sich philanthropische Tatigkeit dennoch als – wenngleich Soziale – Investition beschreiben und welchen Nutzen hat eine solche Perspektive fur die wissenschaftliche Analyse und fur die Praxis? Unser Beitrag untersucht diese Fragestellung auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse des Forschungsprojekts „Strategies for Impact in Philanthropy“ (SIP). Ausgangspunkt fur unser Vorhaben war die Beobachtung, dass die materiellen Ressourcen, die Stiftungen zur Verfugung stehen, in Relation zu den adressierten Problemen in der Regel als marginal anzusehen sind.

Philanthropy and Education

This series highlights first-rate scholarship related to education and philanthropy, attracting the top authors writing in the field. Philanthropy is broadly defined to include time, talent, and treasure. In addition to traditional forms and definitions of philanthropy, the series highlights philanthropy in communities of color as well as philanthropy among women and LGBT communities. Books in the series focus on fundraising as it is an integral part of increasing philanthropy and has an ever-increasing market.

Education Philanthropy in Germany and the United States

One of the most significant international trends in education is the increasingly important role of private actors in the improvement of public schools (Meyer and Rowan 2006). International advisory firms, non-profit organisations, corporate social responsibility divisions of commercial enterprises, individual consultants and a growing number of philanthropic foundations have joined the field which used to be almost exclusively government domain (Bethge 2006; Rowan 2006). The public school system is thus becoming an arena where new and old actors meet in order to improve its quality in possibly innovative, often collaborative, and sometimes contentious ways.

Philanthropic Impact and Effectiveness in Education

In the previous chapters we introduced six case studies of philanthropic interventions to set the stage for the more analytical part of this book. These cases enable us to better assess the type, scale and scope of the social impact that is actually caused by education philanthropy, and allows us to build our model on empirical rather than anecdotal evidence. Because we observed major differences in the quality and quantity of the evidence presented by programmes to prove their effectiveness, and knowing that evaluations may be biased and more a matter of public relations rather than neutral feedback, we concluded that an overall assessment was necessary. Hence, as a further step, the nineth chapter compared the evidence for each individual programme to help us arrive at a more differentiated and profound judgement of what each case really achieved. In the following we introduce a model of social problem solving based on the common lessons that we can learn from these very diverse programmes in terms of the generation of social impact.