Business Leaders Plan to Encourage Volunteerism

Eighteen leaders of some of America’s largest corporations met with President Bush

last month to announce a new campaign to encourage businesses to promote volunteering among their employees.

Through the project, called Businesses Strengthening America, the business leaders intend to create a set of principles and strategies to help companies develop employee-volunteer programs, or to better encourage, reward, and measure existing volunteer efforts. The leaders, most of whom are from Fortune 500 companies, hope to recruit businesses of all sizes to join the campaign. Each business would articulate its own goals for improving volunteerism and civic engagement among employees.

Corporations “may not have the answers, but we have the resources and the expertise and the ability to have an impact, and act as a booster rocket to current efforts to inspire people to serve,” says Ben Binswanger, vice president of AOL Time Warner’s company foundation, who attended the White House meeting with the company’s chairman, Stephen Case.

Businesses Strengthening America, says Mr. Binswanger, is meant to respond to the president’s call to national service, Mr. Bush’s proposal that Americans commit at least 4,000 hours of their lives to serve their neighbors and country.

The new business-run campaign intends to report annually to the president and Congress on its progress.