Benefit Corporations: businesses serving their communities

(Il Sole 24 Ore Radiocor) The needs of communities often change more rapidly than the resources available to local authorities. Consequently, issues such as affordable housing, the regeneration of underused assets, the energy transition, sustainable mobility and support for the most vulnerable groups require substantial action, which inevitably necessitates collaboration with stakeholders other than public bodies alone. In this context, the Benefit Corporation model can play a key role: these are, in fact, businesses that combine their economic activities with objectives of public benefit and which, precisely because of this characteristic, can become key partners in developing solutions to meet local needs. The aim is not to entrust businesses with functions that are the responsibility of the public administration, but to foster a collaboration capable of bringing together different resources and skills. Thus, local authorities – with their knowledge of local needs, capacity for guidance and responsibility towards the community – come together with businesses capable of bringing project planning, innovation, specialist expertise and, in some cases, private capital aimed at generating a positive impact for local communities. This dialogue takes place within a dynamic that finds a possible framework in the principle of horizontal subsidiarity: the pursuit of the common good can arise from collaboration between institutions, businesses, the third sector and citizens, without this leading to an overlap of roles. Furthermore, in the case of Benefit Corporations, the positive impact on the local area is not a secondary activity, but an integral part of the company’s mission and, increasingly, an integral part of its business model. This characteristic makes such collaborations particularly attractive to local authorities, especially when they are faced with complex problems that require expertise and resources which are difficult to mobilise within the local authority itself.

A concrete example comes from the housing and urban regeneration sector.Homes4All, a social enterprise founded in Turin in 2019, revitalises property to broaden access to housing, including for people facing hardship, and through Homes4All Lab has built a network of professionals, businesses and third-sector organisations to launch new initiatives across the region. Habitus is moving in a similar direction: through the Habitus Lab project, it transforms derelict spaces into community hubs, creating training programmes for young people and vulnerable groups, and returning to the community places that had become symbols of decay. In both cases, the organisation does not merely carry out a project, but makes available the expertise and networks needed to transform a problem into a sustainable initiative. A second example concerns energy and mobility. ForGreen is a benefit corporation that develops energy communities in which citizens and businesses share the value of clean energy, building models of shared governance on how to produce, distribute and consume energy. Organisations such as Sagelio, on the other hand, focus on electric and sustainable mobility, supporting local authorities and tourism operators in developing ways of using the local area that reduce pollution and protect the shared environment. In both cases, the contribution of the benefit corporation goes beyond the provision of a technical service, extending to the ability to make citizens and institutions active participants in the change. A third example shows how the benefit model can generate impact even in areas far removed from a company’s core business. Agevola, a Benefit Corporation operating in the financial sector, sponsored ‘Moretto Back Home’: the restoration of a 1520 banner by Alessandro Bonvicino, known as ‘il Moretto’, displayed at the ‘Renaissance in Brescia’ exhibition at the Santa Giulia Museum. The initiative, launched as part of the Alleanza Cultura – a public-private network for the promotion of Brescia’s cultural identity – has returned a work that had long been out of public view to the community, demonstrating how a Benefit Corporation can intertwine social responsibility with the building of a community’s identity.

Benefit corporations and local authorities can therefore establish a productive dialogue to safeguard heritage and advance social objectives: the creation of renewable energy communities, school transport, the management and enhancement of urban green spaces, digital services for community welfare, or the regeneration of derelict buildings and sites for the benefit of the community are areas in which the value for a local authority does not necessarily lie in a simple reduction in expenditure, but may consist in the possibility of mobilising private resources, specialist expertise and local networks that contribute to achieving objectives of public interest. This issue, moreover, is of particular relevance to small and medium-sized local authorities, where the availability of specialist facilities and expertise may be more limited. In such contexts, building a stable network of local partners can enable the local authority to expand its project capacity without necessarily having to replicate all the necessary expertise in-house.

The challenge facing local authorities is to gain an understanding of the business landscape within their area. This is one of the reasons why the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy has made available a map of Benefit Corporations, a tool that allows users to identify organisations operating in different municipalities and provinces, thereby identifying skills that could be useful for building partnerships and co-design projects. The map can thus serve as a practical starting point: not only to find out how many Benefit Corporations are present in a given area, but also to understand which skills can be matched with the needs expressed by the community. This approach is consistent with that of Benefit 4 the City, the City Vision hub dedicated to the finalist companies of the Benefit Competition promoted by the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy. Through stories, interviews and projects, the initiative highlights organisations that use the benefit model to tackle concrete issues relating to sustainability, inclusion, the regeneration of local areas and innovation in services. The Benefit Company can therefore become a partner in creating public value: an organisation capable of identifying a need, transforming it into a project and ensuring its long-term sustainability. For local authorities, this means being able to rely on a broader ecosystem of organisations with which to shape the future of the community; for businesses, it means giving substance to their mission by tackling the real challenges facing their local areas.