Clothing Company CEO Wears Passion for Service on His Sleeve

Jeffrey B. Swartz — head of the Timberland outdoor-wear company and a prominent champion of the AmeriCorps

national-service program — believes so strongly in the benefits of volunteerism that he says he supports making it mandatory for all American citizens. In fact, he’s even considering adding a volunteer requirement for employees at his company. Currently, Timberland offers its employees 40 hours a year in paid leave to spend on volunteer efforts, a benefit taken by 95 percent of its workers.

Yet, ironically, Mr. Swartz for many years swore off volunteerism, confining his philanthropy to cash and donations of his company’s products.

During his college days at Brown University, Mr. Swartz says he had a bad experience when he signed up with a charity to be a mentor to an 8-year-old boy. While he put in the recommended hours doing a variety of activities with the boy, Mr. Swartz says his efforts were a drop in the bucket next to the kind of long-term aid the child truly needed. He says he wishes the charity had done more to train him so that he could have recognized sooner, for example, that one reason the boy was struggling with his homework was because he wasn’t getting enough food at home.

“I felt like I let this kid down,” says Mr. Swartz. “I felt guilty rather than powerful. I felt disappointed in myself.”

Mr. Swartz compares the experience to a consumer who has tried an unsatisfactory product. “You don’t become brand-passionate. If the experience doesn’t satisfy, you become brand antipassionate,” he says. “You say, ‘I tried this and it wasn’t for me.’ Which is to say you’re taking a risk if you just bring good intentions to something and it doesn’t work out the way you want it to.”

Another Try

His view changed, however, 15 years ago, when the leaders of City Year, a charity supported by Timberland that runs service programs in 13 cities using AmeriCorps members and grants, asked him to participate in a volunteer event. The project involved spending five hours painting a residential hall in Hampton, N.H., for an organization that helps adolescents with emotional and behavioral problems.

Mr. Swartz says he went into the project with low expectations, but once there he was impressed with the way every detail was planned. “It looked effortless, but they probably spent 100 hours preparing it,” he says.

What really won him over was the meeting City Year set up with the volunteers and the teenage residents after the painting was finished. Mr. Swartz says he didn’t really want to join the meeting, fearing that he and the other adults would have little to offer the teenagers, many of whom were recovering from drug addictions. But then City Year’s deputy director, Stephen Spaloss, starting talking about his own experiences with drugs. “He showed the scars on his wrists and said, ‘I tried to kill myself when I was recovering from my addiction,’” Mr. Swartz recalls. “I’m telling you, there was no oxygen left in that room.”

An Experience to Share

That afternoon, Mr. Swartz says, taught him a powerful lesson. “I thought, OK, I get this. I understand peer mentoring. I understand the role of a role model. This is the most visceral and powerful community service I have ever seen.”

He returned to Timberland — the company created by his grandfather and expanded by his father — with the zeal of a religious convert.

“As a brand builder, I thought this experience was something that should be shared,” says Mr. Swartz. He immediately called a meeting at the company’s warehouse and stood on a cherry picker to announce his plan to give employees paid leave to volunteer.

The initial reaction, he says, was underwhelming. “I said, ‘What I mean is we’re going to use paid time during the work week.’ Nothing. Nobody responded.” One employee later told him that many employees already volunteered and may have felt patronized. Also, some felt managers would still discourage employees from taking the time away from work.

Undeterred, Mr. Swartz established the paid-leave policy. He promoted it by urging employees and managers to use the leave, and made it easier for them to do so by creating an office to oversee the program. Gradually, the number of employees participating began to rise.

But even as the program grew in popularity with employees, it ran into resistance from some board members. In 1995, after Timberland reported its first loss in eight years, questions arose at a board meeting over whether the company could continue to pay for volunteer time. Mr. Swartz, then chief operating officer, argued that Timberland could sell more products, strengthen its brand, and promote its goal of helping others by making public service part of its image, a strategy he calls “boots, brand, belief.”

After he outlined this vision, Mr. Swartz recalls, one member, a banker, barked, “Country club crap.” The board member added: “This is a business, not a self-indulgent fantasy. If you get this wrong, you’ll be out.”

Mr. Swartz kept his job, and the company’s profits rebounded. In 1998, Mr. Swartz was named chief executive.

Today, employees list the volunteer leave time among their top two reasons for working at the company, according to Fortune magazine. For the past six years, the magazine has ranked Timberland among its “100 Best Companies to Work For,” a rating based in large part on employee surveys. Bonnie M. Monahan, vice president for planning and business development, says she joined the company three and a half years ago because it provides “an environment where you can live your values every day.”

Timberland also offers sabbaticals to employees who want to work on a charitable project. And the entire company, which operates in 20 countries, closes its doors once a year so that all employees can participate together in a day of community service, which has included painting schools, building playgrounds, and fixing up parks.

Anonymous Gifts

In his personal philanthropy, Mr. Swartz, 43, has strong views but offers few details. He says he and his wife give 10 percent of their money and time to charity each year, although he declined to name specific causes, saying he prefers to give anonymously in the Jewish tradition of tzedakah, a Hebrew word that means “righteousness.” One of the most valued types of tzedakah is anonymous giving, where neither donor nor recipient knows the other.

However, he does say that the bulk of his estimated $100- to $200-million fortune will be given to charity when he dies, possibly through a foundation.

Timberland Style

Mr. Swartz’s volunteer efforts include eight years as chairman of City Year.

Charity leaders who have worked with Mr. Swartz say that, with his youthful appearance and high energy, he more closely resembles an AmeriCorps member than a corporate CEO. In a recent interview with a reporter at Timberland’s headquarters here, Mr. Swartz wore a flannel shirt, khaki pants, and the company’s signature rugged boots, and he lunched on a box of cheese-flavored whole-grain crackers between answers.

Mr. Swartz says a major focus for him currently is persuading other corporate executives to adopt volunteer policies similar to his own company’s, and on persuading Congress to expand AmeriCorps and other service programs. He also hopes to draw consumers into becoming more active by not only inviting them to volunteer but also encouraging them to selectively buy products from companies engaged in community service. The company has added a section on its Web site, http://www.timberland.com, devoted to community service, where it notes its volunteer efforts and corporate donations and lists volunteer opportunities.

AmeriCorps and other service programs play an important role, says Mr. Swartz, by introducing Americans to volunteerism in an organized and productive way.

“The big trick is to get them out of their chair into the game,” he says. Initially at least, “the game has to be rigged. You let people feel very powerful, have a great experience, and then you gently begin to challenge them” to expand their volunteer commitments.

A federal program, he says, can also help winnow out duplicate services by promoting only those groups that have demonstrated success. “You can find two groups two miles apart serving the same constituency, fighting over the same donors,” he says. “There are some aspects of brilliance in each, not enough in either. If this were two grocery stores, one of them would find a way to take the other one’s customers away.”

Expanding AmeriCorps

The key now is to expand the number of volunteer and service opportunities available through programs like AmeriCorps, says Mr. Swartz. He has lobbied Congress on behalf of national service programs like City Year, calling them “a model worth investing in.” More than a third of City Year’s funds came from the federal government last year. It lost half of its 1,000 workers as a result of AmeriCorps program cuts last year, but donations from private sources enabled it to hire a total of 750 workers.

Last year, when Congress was considering various bills to protect the program, Mr. Swartz wrote a newspaper editorial and called members of Congress and corporate CEO’s to ask for their support.

Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, says efforts by Mr. Swartz and others helped strengthen support for AmeriCorps with members of Congress. “His calls expressing concerns over AmeriCorps funding certainly had a strong impact,” he says. This year, the House approved increased funds for AmeriCorps as part of a comprehensive spending bill that is pending in Congress.

Mr. Swartz also has pushed City Year to expand its services by finding new sources of income, such as charging businesses for organizing their volunteer projects, says Michael Brown, a co-founder of the charity.

“Jeff as a person is a force of nature,” Mr. Brown says. “He has this energy, this passion. You just can’t replicate that.”

Mr. Swartz says getting people hooked on volunteerism should be a top priority for all leaders of this country right now, corporate, government, and nonprofit. To that end, he says, he may require all his employees to participate in at least some community service.

“You know that song ‘Riders on the Storm’?” he says, referring to the 1970s hit by the Doors. “It’s time to say to people, Hey, it’s the price of citizenship. People say that’s coercive, but I feel so strongly that there’s this greatness within people. I don’t want any riders on the storm here, I want people to be the storm.”