14 April 2008

Representatives of business, local government, academic field and particularly representatives from the Faculty of Natural Sciences held a meeting aimed at promoting the best cooperative practices of business with the civil society, organized by the Center for Business and Public Reforms Promotion and supported by Soros Foundation.

Issues discussed in the meeting related to the need for building good relations between business and civil society. Practice shows that while the civil society role is consolidated in many regards and aspects of social life, it is still difficult to find ways of cooperation with the business community and to ensure a wide commercial activity with it.

The business – civil society relations are several and appear in the form of philanthropies in such activities like culture, sports, education and are not built as relations of a joint interest. The participants spoke about examples of cooperation, mentioning the cooperation with the USAD’s “Fostering Ethical Behavior in the Albanian Business Community” project, regional programmes “Business with a human spirit” and with some UNDP projects.