Despite the political shifts taking place under the Trump administration — including policy walkbacks concerning social initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion — corporate social responsibility teams at companies largely expect their budgets to remain steady in 2026, according to a recent survey from the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals.
The survey, released by the social impact-focused membership organization in January, found that 62% of members expected corporate impact budgets to remain the same this year, with 17% anticipating increases and 21% expecting decreased budgets.
“I was pleasantly surprised that the majority of our members are sticking with their strategy. It's pretty much stay the course, keep it moving,” ACCP President and CEO Andrea Wood said in an interview. “I would say there's a lot of caution right now about how they're talking about the work [and] what language they're using.”
ACCP is a trade association for CSR and ESG professionals with over 260 companies as members across more than 20 industries, according to the organization’s website. Members include American Express, Boeing, The Coca-Cola Company, eBay, Target, 3M, Pfizer and FedEx.
Wood took on the dual roles of CEO and president in January 2025, transitioning from working at a member company to leading the organization after working in social impact roles at Best Buy and Target for nearly two decades, according to LinkedIn.
“The proof of why CSR is important is there, if anybody wants to know how or why it positively affects the business and the community,” Wood said. “This is really table stakes now; companies should be doing this. If they don't have a CSR function, if they don't have a plan, they need one.”
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESG DIVE: Having transitioned from engaging as a member of ACCP to becoming CEO and president, what does your day-to-day look like now?
ANDREA WOOD: I've loved [the transition]. I loved doing the work in big companies and enjoyed being able to think about strategy and how corporate social responsibility aligns with the business and community needs. But, what I love about this role is that I get to help a lot of companies. And our focus is to help them have a greater impact and to help them develop as professionals within the field.
We are taking a bigger picture approach. We're talking to our members. We're doing research on the field. We're providing a lot of programming for early career folks who are just joining the CSR teams to mid-career to senior level leaders, and we have lots of webinars. We have member discussions. We have an online forum where members can just post questions.
It's kind of the intelligence of the herd. How do we tap into the members and their collective knowledge? And then, I'm looking at trends. I'm looking at where the CSR field is now, what companies are doing and where we think we might be headed so that we can make sure that we're providing the resources and the support and the professional development to make sure that our members are ready for both now and the future.
What have you heard from companies and members over the past year?
It's been a challenging year. There's some good news, and then there have been some challenges.
The good news is that more than half of our members — in the most recent survey that we did in November — said that they expect that their giving budgets, and [the] budgets to be able to do their work will stay about the same this year. A small percentage actually said they would increase, and a small percentage said that would decrease.
The majority of our members have not taken budget cuts, but I am concerned about what's going to happen this year. We're already seeing a lot of economic headwinds. We started to see them last year. Obviously, our members are part of companies, and the businesses are part of the economy. If the businesses start to suffer, we may see some retrenchment within the corporate social responsibility area and corporate social impact area, because they are part of a business that is maybe cutting expenses or thinking about these economic headwinds and how they're going to respond. That's the challenge.
There's a lot of scrutiny — external stakeholder scrutiny, investor scrutiny, community scrutiny, employee scrutiny, C-suite scrutiny — and a lot of stakeholders that our members are managing. And they're doing a good job, because they have not had to walk away from a long-term strategy.
The one caveat of that is that if the strategy doesn't make sense for their business, if it's not aligned with their business expertise and where they're headed, then they may change their strategy. But, for the most part, they've put a lot of thought and investment into what they're trying to do, are sticking with it and are able to get their stakeholders aligned around that strategy.
We did our last survey at the end of last year, and we're about to launch another one, so I'll be interested to see if there's been any substantive change since November.
What trends are you seeing in members’ long-term corporate social responsibility and impact strategies?
One of the things that we've talked about over and over again, over the last year in particular, is that the CSR strategy has to be aligned with the business. Our members need to make sure that their internal executives, the C-suite, in particular, really understand what they're trying to do.
There's lots of research to show that if you do CSR correctly and you are being strategic about it, it provides positive financial and other benefits to the company as well as the community. There's this term that was coined by Harvard Business Review called “shared value,” which means that when you're looking at how to support your community, you want to make sure that it is aligned with what you do well, and that there are mutual benefits.
For example, we have a lot of companies who are focusing right now on science, technology, engineering and math education for young people, because they are companies that have jobs that are going to require those STEM skills. And yet they're seeing in their communities that young people are not getting the education, the support and the training that they need to be ready for the jobs that these companies are going to have. The shared value of this is that when a company invests in STEM education and provides support, beyond the financial investment — [like] volunteering, internships, career opportunities, career coaching, scholarships — all of those things are investing in their future workforce.
That workforce development piece is really important right now. The labor market is pretty wonky. It's not a great time to be looking for a job right now. That won't always be the case, especially when you look at demographics. There are lots of folks [that are] either older Generation X or baby boomers who are getting ready to retire, and there are not enough young people coming up through the talent pipeline to be able to fill those jobs. If companies are not investing in that pipeline to make sure that they are not leaving any young person behind, they are not going to have enough people to do the jobs that they need.
The other piece is around a focus on employee engagement, employee community engagement and strategic volunteerism. Companies have done a pretty good job of making sure that their employees have opportunities for volunteering in their communities that align with their own individual passions. But there's a strategic side to this too, which is — to use a workforce development example again — if we decide as a company that we need our employees to do a better job of being able to explain technology, how do we give them the opportunity to develop those skills in a volunteering capacity?
