COVID-19 Fourth Sector Response is a collaborative, multi-stakeholder effort to rise to the challenge of the COVID-19 crisis by harnessing the fourth sector of the economy to build a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable future.

The Fourth Sector Development Initiative (FSDI) is a collaboration of public, private, and philanthropic institutions committed to accelerating sustainable, inclusive development by catalysing trillions of dollars of fourth sector growth globally by 2030.

The rules for business are changing rapidly. Leading any organization today is more complex and uncertain than ever. Corporate managers are increasingly asked to do more than deliver financial results or quality goods and services; they are being tasked with tackling massive environmental and societal challenges, operationalizing purpose, and meeting the demands of multiple stakeholders, while navigating an environment of rapid change.

In collaboration with a range of partners, and with support from the UK Department for International Development (DFID), we are engaging stakeholders from the private sector, governments, inter-governmental organizations, communities, academia, civil society, philanthropy, and the fourth sector to establish a growing reservoir of knowledge, tools, and approaches for releasing the potential of for-benefit enterprise to deliver solutions across the entire range of SDGs.

To meet the global demand for better data and understanding about for-benefit organizations, the goal of the Fourth Sector Data Commons is to create a comprehensive, worldwide source of information on the scale, scope and performance of for-benefit organizations, their supporting ecosystem, and other closely aligned organizations. It will be an open, freely accessible, participatory, cloud-based platform that enables users to pool and access existing sources of relevant data; gather, update, expand, and deepen data on ongoing basis; and perform business, impact, and policy analysis and research.

A component of the Fourth Sector Mapping Initiative, the Data Commons will be developed and stewarded for the benefit of public agencies, practitioners, researchers, consumers, economic developers and other members of the fourth sector community.

The Fourth Sector Taxonomy Framework serves as the first step toward creating a classification system of for-benefit organizations, and it provides guidance to businesses, investors, policymakers, academics, and others interested in understanding entities that make up the emerging fourth sector of the economy and its supportive ecosystem. The elements of the Taxonomy Framework are not meant to be prescriptive, but rather to describe the various attributes of such organizations.