Corporate Social Investing

14Making It Work

The year was 1982.

“The major sandbag for the socially conscious executive is in the corporate world itself,” Thomas Drohan observed. The speech by the president of Foremost-McKesson was not only a statement of the day but a prophecy that would hold for nearly two decades.

“It is absolutely chilling,” Drohan went on to tell an executive symposium, “that fewer than 30 percent of all U.S. corporations give anything, and only 6 percent give more than $500 a year to charity.”

Drohan speculated about why corporations were so miserly when it came to supporting nonprofit organizations. He pointed to a “missing ingredient” that causes businesses to come up short in their charitable giving. “Like the Purloined Letter,” he said, “what’s ...