On April 16, The League of Corporate Foundations (LCF) held its 2026 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Press Conference in preparation for its 30th year. As one of the most prominent corporate networks in the Philippines, LCF called on businesses to take a proactive and responsive approach to CSR—not as a side effort, but as a strategic and collaborative solution to the social and environmental crises that threaten Filipinos today.
This year is LCF’s 30th anniversary, and it marked the occasion with a renewed commitment to collaboration and impact. By leveraging the corporate sector’s access to industry leaders, diverse resources, and tapping experts beyond their network, LCF believes that it can support communities facing different adversities more effectively.
Melody Del Rosario, President of the Metro Pacific Investments Foundation, attributed CSR’s success to this sense of industry-wide collaboration. “For CSR to be relevant, you have to make sure that you have experts and scientists to back up most of your programs,” she said.
To achieve this, the conference challenged the corporate sector to pursue their advocacies more strategically. This means stepping away from typical one-off CSR programs, and mobilizing initiatives that are more intentional. With solutions that are grounded in community and expert insights, and target results that are impact-driven and measurable.
“30 years in, the question is no longer whether businesses should invest in communities. Rather, it is whether those investments are built to last and designed to solve,” said Shem Jose Garcia, Chairperson of LCF and Executive Director of Vivant Foundation, Inc. “The world has been changing rapidly and CSR must change with it. What we need to evolve is to align our programs with real needs and accelerate our impact where it matters most.”
What makes a successful and impactful program?
Impact, as Katherine Anne Khoo, Head of Strategy and Impact of Ayala Foundation, told Sustina, goes hand in hand with measurement. There is no impact if there is no data on how many people were helped, how many resources were consumed and generated. And in the Philippines, where sustainability reporting standards are evolving to meet global models and new social and environmental needs, the need to catch up is imperative, if not urgent.
“The consensus globally is actually to make sure that [reporting] is adaptable and able to plug into the existing requirements that are already being rolled out. What that means for the sector is that compliance is the floor,” Khoo said.
“If anything, it helps establish a little bit more rigor in terms of reporting requirements. You only have to watch out for foundations in particular, maybe trying to work to the reporting requirements specifically, right? There has to be a degree of flexibility to make sure that the different program areas that we work in can still be articulated in a way that really kind of speaks to the true impact, without it just being compliance-driven.”
Khoo stressed the need for capacity building among foundations on this matter in order to truly develop a shared framework and make reporting more streamlined. “I think it’s a little bit of a lift in terms of people getting to know what the standards are, because that tends to be very technical and jargon.”
“Right now, foundations don’t have a standardized way of reporting, and so I think if the sector can move towards that and can help inform potential standards, then that’s going to go [far]. But in the long term, [I think] it raises the standard of how we can all coalesce around a really rigorous, sort of, measurement of impact,” she added.
LCF drives this discussion further at the upcoming 2026 CSR Conference on July 1-2, 2026 at Bayanihan Center, Pasig, Metro Manila. With the theme “Adapt. Align. Accelerate.,” LCF aims to broaden the corporate sector’s capacity to face today’s challenges head on by addressing genuine community needs, and maximizing impact through strategic collective action.
Through these conversations, the network seeks to raise the overall standard of CSR in the Philippines, with a strong focus on meaningful outcomes and measurable change.
