For its 10th anniversary, the Center for Philanthropy Studies at the University of Basel (CEPS) and Swiss Philanthropy Foundation organized a breakfast debate on Thursday, June 7th, on the „10 trends shaping philanthropy today“. Moderated by Sacha Sidjanski, head of external relations at EPFL’s Faculty of Life Sciences, the sustainable trends in philanthropy and its practices over the past 10 years have been discussed.
Alongside Professors Henry Peter (Director of the Centre for Philanthropy at UNIGE), Alexandre Lambelet (Associate Professor at the School of Social Work and Health) and Georg von Schnurbein (Director of CEPS), Sabrina Grassi, Director of Operations at Swiss Philanthropy Foundation, spoke about the importance of collaboration. This theme is one of the major aspects of current philanthropy with the emergence of donor circles that gather around common projects to create a leverage effect and a major and global impact. This is the case for collaborative funds, which are developing within Swiss Philanthropy Foundation (SPF): for example, Partners for a New Economy fund, which brings together four major active foundations in the field of the environment. The sheltered fund structure allows them to pool their resources and expertise to support larger projects and maximize their impact on supported projects.
On the other hand, and at the national level, Swiss Philanthropy Foundation it is part of the network “Fondations abritantes” which gather the swiss based umbrella foundations and organizes meetings between peers each year.
Also and from a European perspective, SPF is the representative for Switzerland of the Transnational Giving Europe (TGE) cross-border donations network and is the Chair of the network this year.
The collaboration, as well as the professionalization of philanthropy is also an approach for the other panellists since the new Centre for philanthropy at the University of Geneva and CEPS have joined forces with Swiss Philanthropy Foundation to offer you the 2018 Master Class « Fondations : nouvelle(s) génération(s) ? »which will take place from November 12 to 14 in Geneva. To know more :