This year, MovingWorlds was honored with two Anthem Awards for Sustainability, Environment & Climate — honors that celebrate mission-driven work advancing social and environmental progress worldwide. Out of more than 2,300 submissions from 44 countries, our initiatives stood out for the way they mobilize corporate partners to create systemic impact.

• Our program Partnering with the Corporate Sector to Create Market Opportunities for Impact Entrepreneurs received a Bronze Award in Partnership or Collaboration, recognizing how we help global companies channel their expertise and resources to scale social enterprises addressing sustainability challenges. 

• Our collaboration with SAP, Scaling a Culture of Corporate Social Responsibility through the SAP Acceleration Collective, earned a Silver Award in Corporate Social Responsibility, honoring how corporate employees can co-create meaningful impact through experiential learning and capacity-building with social innovators.

Together, these awards affirm a powerful truth: real, sustainable impact happens when businesses, social enterprises, and communities work together — not in isolation.

While we’re deeply honored to receive this recognition, what matters most is what it represents: the power of partnership. These awards are a reflection of the incredible companies, innovators, and community members who collaborate with us every day to build more equitable and sustainable systems.

In that spirit, this post isn’t just about what we won — it’s about what we’ve learned from the partnerships behind these wins, and what is ACTUALLY working in the fields of Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Innovation.

What’s Working in Building Sustainable Impact

Here are five lessons that continue to shape our work in building high-impact, meaningful, and award-winning corporate social responsibility and skills-based volunteering programs.

1. Start by Centering the People You Serve

The most powerful and lasting impact happens when we center the people and communities we aim to serve. This isn't just a philosophy; it's a practice that ensures equity, effectiveness, and sustainability.

The best way we've found to operationalize this principle is through Human-Centered Design (HCD). When we listen first, co-create with empathy, and design around lived experience, outcomes improve for everyone.

2. Collaboration is the Real Accelerator

When companies and social enterprises co-design solutions, innovation happens faster and lasts longer. We’ve seen how shared ownership turns one-off projects into ongoing, measurable impact.

Frameworks like Network Leadership and Collective Impact help corporations set aside their short-term time pressures and instead focus on meaningful, long-term change. 

3. Partnerships Only Work When There’s Mutual Learning

The most transformative partnerships aren’t transactional — they’re reciprocal. Corporate teams learn from social innovators about adaptability, equity, and resilience. Social enterprises learn from corporates about systems, scaling, and sustainability. 

Mutual learning also depends on trust and openness. Capturing and sharing quality data is hard, and riddled with privacy concerns. But investing in systems that enable real-time sharing of data, and being transparent with it, helps ignite curiosity and exposes opportunities for improvement.

4. Experimentation Benefits Everyone – When We Share Insights

Nobody has all the answers to the challenges of our time. We have to experiment to see what can work at scale. In order to experiment, we need to think less like fundraisers and business leaders, and more like researchers: valuing the search for knowledge over the pursuit of perfection or profit. 

When collaborators share their biggest blockers and opportunities, then co-design experiments and share lessons learned, innovation happens faster. Speaking openly with our partners, customers, and users about what is working – and more importantly what isn’t working – has helped us and our partners unlock new pathways for impact.

5. People Power the Movement

Behind every system, program, or partnership are individuals — employees, entrepreneurs, mentors, volunteers — who make it real day-to-day. Their creativity, empathy, and persistence are the true engines of change. At MovingWorlds, it is our team of amazing humans that show up every day to create the connections and tools that help our members accelerate their impact. And across our partners, it is the people on the other side of every Zoom/Teams/Meet call who show up with open hearts and minds that make this kind of collective progress possible.

Treating the people driving this work with respect, injecting joy, and celebrating accomplishments helps strengthen bonds – and build the trust – that fuels lasting collaboration.

A Moment of Gratitude and Commitment

These awards remind us that recognition can — and should — reflect something bigger than a single organization. 

They celebrate our collective commitment to collaboration and systems change that’s driving the future of sustainability. These awards belong to all of our amazing partners like EY, Reckitt, SAP, F5, Lumen, Bayer Foundation, and even more so to the thousands of social impact organizations we support in over 110 countries. 

We see more companies realizing that sustainability and innovation aren’t separate goals — they’re deeply intertwined (and the ROI is proven, even in uncertain times). When businesses partner with social enterprises, they don’t just "give back"; they move forward — building resilience, relevance, and shared prosperity.

We’re grateful for the Anthem Awards — but even more grateful for what they represent. They affirm that partnership, shared learning, and human-centered collaboration work.

To every social enterprise, impact professional, and corporate partner in our community: thank you for proving that sustainable change is possible when we collaborate together.

And to the businesses still searching for meaningful ways to connect purpose with performance — we’d love to learn and build with you. Want to explore partnership opportunities or launch a skills-based volunteering program at your company? Let’s talk.