November 2005

Rethinking Community Service

Career and volunteer goals, like oil and water, don’t mix. I learned that lesson in the early seventies as a green newspaper reporter working for a company whose managers felt journalists should report their volunteer activities to the HR department. Political activism was on the rise then, and the managers said they feared assigning writers to stories where they might show favoritism to personal community involvements. Even if we didn’t show bias, they said, they wanted to avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest.

We reporters were appalled. After all, wasn’t volunteering a private matter as sacrosanct as the secret ballot? Most of us had felt pressure from organizations seeking favorable publicity, and we knew it was not always easy to say no, but we were not about to register our involvements with our employer. Our union fought the registration plan and won, but for me the battle left a permanent mark: I stopped joining organizations. My volunteer activities from then on were strictly informal neighborly acts or faceless monetary contributions.

These days we hear a lot about philanthropy in the for-profit workplace. The concept still sounds strange to me, but some of the Business School’s alumni/ae are persuasive advocates for joint employer/employee community investments that go well beyond workplace solicitations for the United Way. In 2002, Liz Kao, MBA ’01, wrote me that she joined Salesforce.com partly because that software company promotes what it calls “compassionate capitalism” by donating 1 percent of profits, 1 percent of equity and 1 percent of employee time to charitable actions in the community. Kao, who began her workplace volunteering by helping kids with digital photography and recording projects, says now those volunteer hours have “enhanced my productivity by providing a refreshing break from the usual patterns of a work week and by reminding me to keep work and life in perspective.”

Steve Knaebel, MBA ’69, relates his experience starting a company foundation for a division of Cummins Inc. in a large Mexican city. He began the foundation to tackle community problems but discovered the beneficiaries included his own employees and company. Community projects proved to be great “leadership laboratories.”

We can learn only so much from experience. Some knowledge must come from reading. Experience has taught me great satisfaction can be gained from my ad hoc efforts to lend a helping hand now and then. I’ve also shared the excitement of team successes at paid work for nonprofit employers. Knaebel and Kao force me to see that there are other models for how to meld one’s work for pay and work for community. Our feature on alumni/ae involved in microfinance, page 18, demonstrates other approaches our readers are taking. We try to help you share experiences like these with each other.

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Kathleen O'Toole
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