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Foundations

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management

  • 14 Accesses

Synonyms

Charitable trust; Endowment; waqf

Background

The nonprofit sector is characterized by a great diversity of activities, organizations, and institutions (Anheier 2022). Especially, charitable foundations are well-known social institutions in the third sector due to their philanthropic projects (e.g., Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Nobel Foundation). The history of foundations dates back thousands of years: Some researchers traced back the origins of foundations to the library of Alexandria (Coon 1938). These early forms operated locally with a limited amount of assets used for grantmaking. In the Middle Ages, the Christian church took over an important role in the increasing value of foundations. In the Islamic world, waqfs are known as an equivalent to foundations (Kiger 2022; Ali and Oseni 2021).

The growth of foundations over the recent decades depends on many contextual factors. Therefore, countries around the world face quite different...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rhine-Waal University of Applied Science, Kleve, Germany

    Ute Merbecks

Authors
  1. Ute Merbecks
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Correspondence to Ute Merbecks .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. London Metropolitan University, Guildhall Faculty of Business and Law London Metropolitan University, London, UK

    Samuel Idowu

  2. Cologne Business School, Ingolstadt, Germany

    René Schmidpeter

  3. College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Nicholas Capaldi

  4. International Training Centre of the IL, International Labor Organization, Turin, Italy

    Liangrong Zu

  5. Department of Economics, Society and Politics, University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Urbino, Italy

    Mara Del Baldo

  6. Instituto Politécnico da Guarda, Guarda, Portugal

    Rute Abreu

Section Editor information

  1. Leeeds Business School, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Brian T. Jones

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Merbecks, U. (2023). Foundations. In: Idowu, S., Schmidpeter, R., Capaldi, N., Zu, L., Del Baldo, M., Abreu, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_616-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02006-4_616-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-02006-4

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