Illustrative image for Policy on Acceptance of Gifts and Grants from Corporations and Corporate Foundations

Policy on Acceptance of Gifts and Grants from Corporations and Corporate Foundations

This document lays out the principles and practices The Hastings Center aims to deploy to guide its relationship with corporations and corporate foundations wishing to make gifts or grants to Hastings. The Center’s longstanding policy has been only to accept unrestricted gifts, disconnected from a given research project or publication. However, this constraint ignores two realities: (1) certain kinds of scholarship today can only be done in partnership with industry, since it is only through such partnerships that bioethicists can come to understand the industry practices and policies they aim to study, and (2) partnership with industry can lead to ethical guidelines and innovative practice that can reduce harms and uncertainty that industry itself may wish to improve through interaction and consultation with bioethics.

Acutely attuned to both the reality and the appearance of any conflict of interest in the acceptance of financial support of its work, the Center’s Board of Directors has adopted the following guidelines:

  1. The Center will not accept gifts or grants if doing so would undermine the reputation and integrity of the Center. The Center reserves the right to decline support from any donor with which the Center does not wish to be publicly associated.
  1. Regardless of the source of funding, the Center will retain exclusive and autonomous control over its research projects and publications.
  1. The Center will not accept anonymous gifts from corporations, corporate foundations, or other for-profit entities. The Center will disclose all gift and grant sources in all relevant publications and venues.
  1. Acceptance of a gift or grant from a company does not imply the Center’s endorsement of that company’s policies, practices, or products.
  1. Each time there is a prospect of a corporate gift, the idea will be presented to The Hastings Center’s Conflict of Interest (COI) Committee, composed of the COI Officer, ex officio (the Chief Operating Officer or their designee); the President; one additional Hastings employee; and one member of the Board of Directors. The committee will consider the proposal according to rules and guidelines articulated by the Board of Director’s Executive Committee. Since ethical concerns are likely to be case-specific, different proposals will engender different values and ethical considerations, all of which cannot be specified in advance and will therefore require careful analysis by the COI Committee. If the COI Committee identifies any actual or potential perceived conflict, they will develop a management plan if possible and, if not, The Hastings Center will not accept the funding. A management plan might include a variety of different features, such as requiring pooled funding from multiple sources or limiting the extent of industry involvement (e.g., inviting industry’s input related to ways of working or the issue they are having trouble with, but then asking them to remove themselves during the Center’s deliberation).
  1. In accordance with the Center’s written conflict of interest policies, as a regular and routine matter, all members of the Center’s staff and Board of Directors are required to disclose any financial interest in, or consulting arrangement with, any outside entity, including any company providing financial support to the Center. If any of these disclosures are deemed actual or potential conflicts of interest by the COI Officer, a meeting of the COI Committee is called and the matter is discussed and, if necessary, a management plan is developed, as described in the Center’s COI Policy for staff and board.

Approved by the Board of Directors
September 30, 2022