* Recession remolds Bill Clinton's philanthropic summit

* Focus on companies profited from tackling problems

By Michelle Nichols

NEW YORK, June 23 (Reuters) - Responding to the global recession, former U.S. President Bill Clinton's philanthropic summit this year will focus on ways for companies to profit from tackling poverty, climate change, health and education.

To keep companies engaged in fighting the world's problems amid an economic crisis that has seen millions of people lose their jobs, summit organizers said the meeting had to evolve from an event where corporate chiefs showed up and just wrote checks to support humanitarian work.

"We recognized that the CGI (Clinton Global Initiative) of old was no longer going to be a feasible model to move forward on," said Edward Hughes, CGI's deputy director and director of program for the fifth annual summit this September.

"(Companies) couldn't simply treat us as a place where their foundation would come and write checks to NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), but rather for them to remain engaged, (CGI) had to deliver value to their core bottom line, to their business operations," he said. "We needed to justify this as being a real value-return exercise."

The summit was born out of Clinton's frustration while president from 1993 to 2001 at attending conferences that were more talk than action.

It gathers heads of state, celebrities, business leaders and humanitarians to tackle the issues of poverty, energy and climate change, health and education. More than 1,400 pledges of action valued at $46 billion have been made since CGI began in 2005.