Acronym

Eradicating hunger and poverty. Achieving universal primary education. Reducing child mortality. Ensuring environmental sustainability. These are just four of the eight United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) established in 2000 to resolve the world’s greatest social, economic and social problems.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, special advisor to the UN on the MDG and a speaker at ASAE & The Center’s Global Summit on Social Responsibility April 30, recommends that association leaders consider starting with these goals as they contemplate the business opportunities presented by such global challenges.

“I believe every association has as its responsibility, as well as its self-interest, awareness of those global goals, readiness to advocate for them, and readiness to step up for them and say, ‘We will support them through our own specific actions that are appropriate,’” Sachs said during a phone interview last week. “My guess is that many, many of these organizations have never even considered these Millennium Development Goals,” in large part because “we’ve hardly been told anything about them….”

He also suggests we learn from the positive and negative lessons gained by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to date. Two lessons in particular are the “extremely important” need for organizations to take a proactive stance or risk severe reputational harm, and the need to understand that associations are “going to have to operate in a kind of public-private partnership to play an effective role.”

As an example, Sachs cites the pharmaceutical industry’s proactive declaration that it had “created a tiered pricing system that would make their technologies available free to the poorest people while continuing to operate under the patent system in the high-income countries. That was a very creative and positive response that diffused what was a growing crisis.”

The full interview with Sachs about five potential roles for associations and nonprofits in global problem solving will appear in an upcoming issue of Associations Now.