Thomson Reuters Foundation:
TrustLaw Serving the World's Poor
Questions:
How can a corporate foundation with little money but a global brand have the greatest possible impact? How does it build a learning organization, craft a mission, and leverage its strengths through communications? How does it recruit and retain partners globally to support its mission of women’s rights and social entrepreneurship?
Brief:
The case explores the rapid growth and evolution of the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s TrustLaw program, including how a small staff built partnerships with the world’s largest law firms and helped change the fate of domestic workers in the Philippines, battered women in China, micro-borrowers in the EU, and villages in India without reliable energy. It analyzes the program’s learning processes and how it identifies strengths and adjusts weaknesses. It derives lessons for social impact in working across borders and finds the impact of working with “more than money.”