Corporate Volunteerism

[Gilbert Brenson-Lazan]

Hi, Lisa:

Here´s one experience we had several years ago that hasn´t been mentioned 
yet and may be useful to you.

A transnational food products company in Colombia, South America, wanted to 
show its Corporate Social Responsibility with a corporate volunteerism 
project in the small farming towns surrounding their plant and where the 
dairy farmers (their providers) lived and worked.  Our original plan was to 
just do an OS for the interested people in the company and the NGOs that 
were interested in (read that "competing for")  getting the job.

Halfway through the day´s work with several excellent plans on the wall, 
one group asked itself, then asked other groups, why are they deciding this 
when it is the communities themselves that should be participating in 
deciding what kind of help they wanted and needed.  The idea spread like a 
wildfire amongst the seventy some people in attendance and the only 
decision made that day was to take the process to the three small towns and 
ask them.  Three groups of volunteers offered to promote the idea in each 
of the towns and outlying areas.

At each of the three, half-day OS sessions on three successive Saturday 
mornings, an average of 150 peasant farmers, their families, town political 
leaders (who of course tried to "organize" the event which we didn´t 
allow), NGO leaders that served the communities and volunteers from the 
Company met to discuss the particular community needs and what the company 
could do, in a non-paternalistic way, to help them develop sustainable 
programs.

The impact was amazing, not just in the development of the programs, many 
of which are still in place and functioning many years later, but in the 
collective self-image of the people who learned that day that they can do 
something about their reality.  An interesting by-product that was 
attributed to the OS events by the Company Vice-President for Community 
Affairs, was that in all three of the towns, representatives of the 
predominant, traditional political parties were thrown out of office at the 
next mayoral and council elections in favor of
grass roots representation.

Warm regards,

Gil

At 02:00 a.m. 24/03/2005, you wrote:
   7. OS for corporate volunteerism (5)
>


*************************************************************
Dr. Gilbert Brenson-Lazán - Executive President
AMAUTA INTERNATIONAL, LLC
Bogotá, Colombia - West Hartford, CT, USA
E-Mail: <<mailto:gbl at amauta.org>gbl at amauta.org>  Website: 
<<http://amauta.org/>http://amauta.org>
*************************************
We optimize the effectiveness of those who facilitate, lead and manage 
processes
of sustainable cultural transformation in organizations and communities.

*
*
==========================================================
OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
------------------------------
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options,
view the archives of oslist at listserv.boisestate.edu:
http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html

To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs:
http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openspacetech.org/pipermail/oslist-openspacetech.org/attachments/20050324/d572c8a8/attachment-0015.htm>