Our role

Our role is to never settle, challenge the comfortable and look outside the box for new ways to drive change. We might be small, but our ideas are big. And it may well be that agile non-profit foundations are perfectly positioned to be changemakers.

Although there is progress in many areas, it’s clear it’s not enough. As a private non-profit foundation we believe we have an important role to play. We are in the position to take risks that many commercial businesses or publicly funded NGOs can’t. We can try new methods, only to find out it didn’t give the impact needed and then try something different. It’s a learning process, developing and improving our work.

As a non-competitive foundation we can create agile ecosystems of individuals, organisations, businesses, and academia sharing a mutual goal and drive transformation in different and powerful ways compared to commercial entities and large institutions. They usually don’t have an incentive to invest in exploratory solutions that may not pan out. We can absorb the risk that comes with disruptive methods and we can invest in agile research and projects where beta versions are continuously released and tested. This method is much faster than the traditional way of working.

Everything is open-sourced

If we want change at scale, doing good is not enough. The most important thing to make change happen is the scale and speed at which our findings are operationalised by others. Transparency is a strong belief for us and we are actively communicating and sharing our results with the industry as we are moving along. When we, together with our broad ecosystem of partners, crack the code of a social or environmental challenge, the next question is “Who can take this, apply it and grow it on a broad scale?”.

Connecting with those scale makers is crucial and part of our plan from scratch, otherwise we would just end up with pretty prototypes. Our open-source mentality is our strength and our aim is that our work should benefit the entire fashion industry and beyond. By sharing our success – and mistakes – we speed up the change.

Our most interesting findings and lessons, good and bad, are transparently shared here on our website and in our social channels. We hope this can inspire others.

a About us

The H&M Foundation is a non-profit foundation for public good, privately funded by the Stefan Persson family, founders and main owners of the H&M Group. We work to fast-track the achievements of the UN Sustainable Development goals by 2030, to safeguard humanity and our planet.