ioby welcomes partnerships and gifts from corporations, small businesses, and other business entities that align with our principles and share our mission: to mobilize neighbors who have good ideas to become powerful civic leaders who plan, fund, and make positive change in their own neighborhoods.
These guidelines apply to each of the following, which we refer to as “corporate support” in this document:
- Cash gifts
- Grants, whether general or as part of a match program
- In-kind donations of goods or services
- Sponsorship of an event or general operations
ioby is especially interested in accepting gifts from or working with companies that:
- Cultivate diverse executive and board of director leadership, including people of color, women, LGBTQ, working-class people, people of all faiths, and people with disabilities.
- Create and enforce progressive labor policies that include staff and contractors who belong to each of these groups.
- Are active in advancing our shared values around community engagement and respect for local resident leadership in the places where they are based.
- Demonstrate a commitment to fair, respectful, and safe labor practices, both domestically and internationally.
- Set, implement, and transparently report out on progress toward clearly-defined environmental sustainability goals that push the boundaries of current business practice (including zero waste material cycles, pollutant and greenhouse gas emissions reduction that meet California state standards, and related aims).
The following principles guide our corporate support acceptance:
- Support must be mission-aligned - ioby will never compromise our mission or our principles in order to secure support. We will only actively solicit corporations that align with our affirmative guidelines below.
- Transparency is key - ioby values transparency in all that we do, and thus never accepts corporate support that we cannot publicly disclose.
- Support cannot buy projects or access to ioby Leaders - The projects that ioby supports always come from ioby Leaders, the neighbors who know best what needs to happen in their community. ioby will not facilitate a specific project(s) as a result of gifts or sponsorship from a corporation. We do not release the contact information of ioby Leaders or any project donors to any firm providing corporate support.
- We seek to “expand the pie” - ioby does not block ioby Leaders or their affiliated organizations from accessing the same sources of corporate support, as we value sharing resources with smaller and/or unincorporated organizations.
- Acceptance of corporate support does not equal endorsement - While ioby staff intend to be careful and thorough in vetting potential corporate supporters, our acceptance of corporate support also neither implicitly or explicitly equals ioby’s endorsement of that company or all of its policies and practices.
Many of the above principles were inspired or coined by thinkers at the Grassroots Institute for Fundraising Training (GIFT) and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).