This week I am in London for the bi-ennial conference of the International Association of Volunteer Effort. While I have attended many of these conferences over the years, from New Delhi to Singapore, for the first time, this convening’s focus is corporate volunteering. With the IAVE publication last year of the first global research report on corporate volunteering, and the increasing role companies are placing on their corporate citizenship, the timing of the focus is both significant and appropriate. This year marks the sixth anniversary of the Global Corporate Volunteer Council and membership now stands at 40 global companies. This group, which I helped found, met just prior to the conference. Both at the council meeting and at the conference, it is exciting to see how companies have truly embraced the collective power in activating employee engagement plus corporate resources to help solve some of sociality’s most pressing issues.
Day one, I moderated a forum titled Re-Imagining Corporate Volunteering. This was the first session of the Corporate track and was meant to be the gateway for what was to come over the next two days. The panelists represented leaders from Ford Motor Company, Samsung, Vale, Hewlett Packard and Mondelez International. The first question I posed to the group was “what will workplace volunteering look like in the next 5 to 10 years?” The answers were as diverse as the types of companies represented. Common themes were exposed. The ability to make a stronger impact, and then better track and understand the outcomes of the impact, is something that many of the companies are well on their way to doing. Moving the actions towards needs of the community, and those needs driving the work, versus the old equation of “I have 25 employees that I need to have volunteer on Saturday, what can you create for me?” Shared value, where the benefit to the company, employees and society are engineered into not only the programs, but how a business operates. Many of these thoughts will be discussed further throughout the conference.
Other highlights so far include seeing former Disney colleagues, hearing Lord Michael Hastings of Scarisbrick, CBE, of KPMG International and lunch with many of our Points of Light HandsOn Network International Affiliates. Next up: “Moving Volunteers to Social Development and Social Justice” with a panel including colleagues Michelle Nunn of Points of Light and Flavia Pansieri of United Nation Volunteers.
http://www.iave.org/london2012 http://www.iave.org/gcvc http://www.pointsoflight.org http://www.unv.org/