Nonprofits need specialized volunteers

NEW YORK - Giving always is good. But giving your expertise to a cause that needs it often is a better use of time than painting a house or delivering meals on wheels.

Some in the business community are calling it "smarter volunteerism," while others describe it as a serious three-year effort to encourage workers to use their own unique skills to build a better community and world.

When the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation and the Corporation for National and Community Service brought together about 150 leaders in February, including many CEOs, there was a shared commitment to a wiser use of both philanthropic dollars and employee volunteer contributions of time and talent to address unmet social needs. At this Summit on Corporate Volunteerism, the focus was on a new definition of "pro bono" or donated time of employees.

In America, there are 1.6 million nonprofit organizations -- 20 million worldwide -- each with an average of nine employees. Only one in 20 of these organizations says it has "adequate resources" to do the job.

Consequently, a national realignment is underway of corporate social responsibility strategies with corporate competencies and assets. The goal of the New York meeting was to begin to create "scaleable models" of capacity building that addresses the critical "gap areas." Within the nonprofit sector, efforts are underway to better match reservoirs of corporate talent -- in such fields as accounting, legal, technology, marketing, finance, strategic planning, business development and human relations -- with the needs of nonprofits.

To Jean Case, who heads the council, the matching of skills and professional volunteerism is a "historic opportunity" for businesses to "accept the challenge to expand the pro bono culture." She credited President John Kennedy's call for donated legal services in 1963 as a "watershed moment for the civil rights movement."

Minnesota's 40.4 percent volunteer rate -- the percentage of adults who give away their time -- ranks third-highest in the country; the national average is 26.7 percent. While nationally, about one in three volunteers drops out of projects before their completion, Minnesota's portion of adults who continue their volunteer service for more than a year leads all the states.

Volunteering is a "win-win," said Tony Dungy, the football coach and University of Minnesota alumnus who is a member of the President's Council. He reported that more than eight in 10 employees say that their employer's "role in the community" is critical to their decision to sign on and stay.

Laysha Ward, vice president of community relations for Target Corp., said that last year, Target gave $150 million to community causes across the country and its employees donated at least 315,000 hours to work on more than 7,000 projects. The company's volunteerism and its related 5 Percent Club charitable giving level trace their roots to the philanthropy institutionalized by the department store empire founded by the Dayton family.

The international consulting firm of Deloitte Touch Tohmatsu, through its CEO James Quigley, committed $50 million worth of pro bono contributions over the next three years. Other major companies recognized included Wells Fargo, General Electric, McKinsey & Co., UPS and Accenture. An additional $200 million in pro bono dollars was committed over the two-day summit, with a goal of providing a total of $1 billion more by year's end, according to organizers.

Target's role as a leader in this reinvented volunteerism push will surface again in Chicago this month when the discounter will join the accounting firm Deloitte and Mayor Richard M. Daley to co-host a Pro Bono Round Table for corporate leaders.

The federal government, too, has its role to play through programs and projects underwritten by the USA Freedom Corps, the Corporation for National and Community Service and the Points of Light and Hands On Network, among other public-private efforts. Last year, $850 million in federal funds went to support volunteerism programs -- largely AmeriCorps (the domestic version of the Peace Corps), Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America (school programs). Minnesota got about $20 million in seed money to leverage through the local corporation office and its Serve/Minnesota operations.