A company that runs a giving program faces an early choice that says a lot about how it sees its own people. It can hand workers a menu of pre-selected causes, or it can let them direct the dollars themselves. The first option keeps control at the top. The second requires trusting that employees, given latitude, will use it well.
JP Conte has landed firmly on the side of trust. He’s managing partner of a San Francisco middle-market private equity firm and founder of the JP Conte Family Foundation, and he has spent his career deciding whom to back and what to fund. He applies a related logic to how corporate giving should be governed.
The Limits of the Curated List
The old model had obvious appeal. A curated list of approved causes kept a company’s giving tidy, on-message, and simple to defend. Leadership picked the charities, communications wrapped them in the brand, and the program ran on rails.
Those same virtues were also its ceiling. A fixed list mirrors the priorities of whoever assembled it, not the breadth of concerns across a workforce. Employees whose passions fell outside the menu had no outlet, and participation suffered as a result. A program designed for control tends to generate less giving than one designed for ownership.
The Case for Employee-Driven CSR
Conte’s argument for employee-directed giving rests on a simple premise: people give more, and stay involved longer, when the cause is theirs. Handing workers the choice signals that the company trusts their judgment, and that trust tends to be repaid in engagement.
The shift demands something of leadership, though, and Jean-Pierre Conte is clear-eyed about it. Ceding the choice doesn’t mean abandoning the program. An open model still needs structure, or it drifts into an unmeasured scatter of small gifts that no one can evaluate.
His operator’s lens is what keeps the two in balance. Conte treats an employee-driven program the way he would treat any system with many inputs. He sets clear guardrails. He builds in ways to track where the money goes and what it does. He reviews whether the participation is producing impact or merely activity. Freedom for employees, accountability for the program.
That balance is harder than either extreme. A locked-down menu is easy to measure and easy to ignore. A fully open program draws enthusiasm but resists evaluation. Conte’s preference is to hold the tension on purpose, and he accepts some administrative cost in exchange for a program people actually use. His view is that the choice belongs to the workforce while the discipline remains a leadership responsibility, and that a company can hold both at once.