A Platform For Collaboration, Accelerating the Growth of the Fourth Sector
The Fourth Sector Group (4SG) is a global multi-stakeholder platform for collective leadership and action aimed at accelerating the growth of the fourth sector worldwide.
4SG connects and supports organizations working to build and contribute to a vibrant fourth sector. We aim to counteract the existing fragmentation among the various actors, spurring greater cooperation and coordination to effectively marshal and manage resources, and, ultimately, match the urgency of the need with the pace and scale of the response.
OUR
VISION
We envision a world in which the purpose of human enterprise is to advance social, environmental and economic benefit, yielding sustainable, inclusive, and resilient societies.
OUR
MISSION
Our mission is to accelerate the growth and uphold the integrity of the fourth sector globally.
Speed and Scale.
Serving as an accelerant of fourth sector development around the world at a pace, scope and scale commensurate with the urgency, magnitude, and breadth of the global social, environmental, and economic challenges to which the fourth sector is a response.
CORE PRINCIPLES
4SG is founded on these core principles:
Collaboration.
Serving as an enabling platform for collaboration that engages, amplifies, integrates, and advances the efforts of multiple stakeholders.
Being a Catalyst.
Serving as a catalyst for the development and expansion of other organizations and initiatives, avoiding building internal or redundant capacity whenever avoidable.
Inclusiveness.
Serving as a neutral, nonpartisan steward of the fourth sector as a whole, engaging a plurality of voices and perspectives and ensuring the sector is strengthened through diversity and inclusion.
Openness.
Serving as an open commons for the sharing of knowledge, tools, and resources.
Stewardship.
Serving as a steward for ensuring the fourth sector develops in a manner that maximizes its positive social, environmental, and economic impacts, while minimizing any harms.
Comprehensiveness.
Taking a comprehensive, systemic approach to the development of the fourth sector’s ecosystem, to ensure that for-benefits have access to the full spectrum of ecosystem resources they need to succeed.
APPLYING THESE PRINCIPLES, WE,
inspire awareness that anyone and everyone can be a part of the fourth sector;
inspire action through key initiatives that promote, develop, and accelerate the rapid growth of the fourth sector; and
support inspired communities that are connected and collaborative.
There is rapidly growing awareness that to address the tenacious social, political, and environmental challenges we face, we need synthetic approaches--crossing disciplines, sectors, and boundaries of all kinds. Prominent among these syntheses is the new form of entrepreneurship that combines the business logic of profit with the myriad of ways that nonprofit organizations try to benefit the social good. The Fourth Sector Group could not be more timely or compelling as a means of igniting this synthesis of individual incentives and commitment to the collective good."
- Larry Diamond,
Faculty Director, Haas Center for Public Service, Stanford University;
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Senior Fellow, Center on Democracy,
Development & the Rule of Law, Stanford University