The Nippon Foundation
Social Impact Partner for the Valuable 500
Our mission is social innovation.
Through this innovation we aim to achieve a society where all people support one another, reducing the burdens and challenges they face together.
Everyone has a role to play: citizens, corporations, nonprofit organizations, governments, and international bodies. By forging networks among these actors, The Nippon Foundation serves as a hub for the world’s wisdom, experience, and human resources, giving individuals the capacity to change society—the hope that they can make a difference.
Our goal is to give all of humanity the chance to participate in creating our future.
The Path to Achieving Social Innovation
At The Nippon Foundation, we are constantly thinking about “building up an inventory of ideas and implementation expertise,” as a means to “create new frameworks for a better society and bring about change.”
This will result in major changes for society as a whole. That is our goal.
However, new social frameworks and changes that will move all of society cannot be created overnight. We therefore view the path to the future as having two phases.
[Social Change]
This phase involves changing the mindsets and actions of individuals, companies, and other organizations.
We believe that actions arising from an awareness of issues close at hand are the starting point from which to change society as a whole.
[Social Innovation]
This phase is achieved through a series of social changes that lead to changes in laws, regulations, and social customs.
Firmly planting a new sense of values in social frameworks and individuals’ subconscious actions will achieve a transformation to a society that is truly sustainable.
No single organization has the capability to implement these comprehensive measures on its own. A hub is needed to create ties that transcend the various perspectives of individuals, companies, NGOs, academia, and international institutions, and to drive the actions that are required. This is The Nippon Foundation’s role. Working through new public-private and private-private sector frameworks, we connect people with a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives, to achieve “a society in which all people support one another.”
Having spent a major part of my life supporting marginalized people left behind the mainstream of society, I am fully convinced that supporting minority disability groups just by reaching out to public institutions such as governments and the United Nations will not bring about effective social change. Unless the majority of society changes, the world will never change.
The Valuable 500 initiative brings disability business inclusion commitment into the global CEO community for the first time not simply based on the concept of social welfare.
Social participation for persons with disabilities means to be able to work and to become taxpayers. Work promotes talents leading the way to self-confidence, pride and happiness. A new work environment is created when diverse groups of people, with or without disabilities interact freely and take action.
