Company Sends Employee Expertise Overseas as Part of Its Philanthropy

In 1999, when Deborah Wafer joined the Pfizer pharmaceutical company as a product manager, she was excited

to have a role in marketing the kinds of drugs she had seen help HIV sufferers during her career as a nurse practitioner. But she was also reluctant to give up working directly with patients. As a longtime volunteer helping HIV-positive women in her native Los Angeles, Ms. Wafer hoped she would one day have a chance to return to the trenches.

She found such an opportunity in the Pfizer Global Health Fellows, a program born in 2003 out of a desire by the company to do more than “checkbook” philanthropy. The fellows program sends about 30 staff members annually to developing countries for up to six months.

Last year, Pfizer flew Ms. Wafer to eastern Uganda, where she spent 15 weeks training health workers through the Foundation for Development of Needy Communities, a local nonprofit group affiliated with the international organization American Jewish World Service. During her stay in Mbale, a city where running water and toilets are a luxury, Ms. Wafer received full salary and benefits and the promise that her job at Pfizer would be waiting for her when she got back.

In February, she returned to her team of co-workers with a changed perspective that she credits for reinvigorating her enthusiasm for the company and her job.

“I have a better appreciation for the resources we have at Pfizer,” she says. “I brought back to my team a reminder of the work we’re doing, who we’re doing it for, and to really focus on the work for those people who will benefit from what we do.”

Overseas sabbatical-like service programs of this kind, which use the technical skills of employees, are growing in popularity in the corporate world. In addition to Pfizer, Cisco Systems and PricewaterhouseCoopers, among others, have begun such programs as a way to expand their philanthropy, advance their mission, and provide their employees with experiences that will benefit them when they return to the corporate world.

“We see a gradual interest in companies wanting to capitalize on their people power,” says Curt Weeden, president of the Association of Corporate Contributions Professionals, in Mount Pleasant, S.C. “Customers are more impressed with such efforts than writing a check for a good cause.”

Assessing the Impact

Pfizer started its program amid a reconsideration of whether its giving was making a sufficient difference, says Paula Luff, the company’s director of international philanthropy.

As the pharmaceutical giant was becoming an increasingly large provider of drugs that treat HIV, it wondered whether it could do more in the global fight against AIDS, malaria, and other diseases devastating the developing world. Its cash and pharmaceutical donations, which amounted to nearly $1.26-billion last year, already make it one of the biggest corporate donors.

Through the program, physicians, nurses, information-technology managers, human-resource experts, and employees in nearly every department at Pfizer are matched with international health and development groups. The idea is to use employees’ expertise to help nonprofit organizations improve their efficiency and effectiveness, rather than simply handing out drugs and walking away.

“It was a reflection of our effort to always be more creative about applying ways to deploy our resources,” says Jeffrey Kindler, the company’s vice chairman and general counsel. “It enables us to take our most valuable assets, which is our skilled colleagues, and make them available to organizations that are working on the front lines so they can they leave a lasting contribution to these organizations in the form of new skills and knowledge.”

To date, Pfizer has sent more than 70 employees to nonprofit groups and multilateral organizations in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

A Business Perspective

Ms. Wafer’s experience has led her to believe that her skills proved more valuable to the nonprofit group she worked with than one-time gifts of medicine.

“A lot of people think that pharmaceutical companies should give drugs away to countries like Uganda that don’t have drugs, but it’s not the drugs alone that people need,” she says. For HIV sufferers, for example, knowing how to take medicine is just as important as simply having the drugs, she says, because even the smallest slip-up in the drug regimen can cause a huge setback, like developing resistance.

As part of her work, she taught community-health volunteers, who are often the only medical staff a village might have, how to treat people and administer drugs. But her skills as a nurse and health educator weren’t always in the most demand, Ms. Wafer says: She also helped the organization run its office and use its computers. And when she noticed how little the office in town communicated with the group that worked in a nearby village, she suggested holding weekly meetings.

The kind of thinking that often comes from working in the business world — how to maximize efficiency, take advantage of technology, and market products — is rare among charities, says Lisa Hunter, of Family Health International, a Research Triangle Park, N.C., organization that works in more than 70 countries.

“It brings a business perspective and resources that we wouldn’t be able to get alternatively,” says Ms. Hunter, whose nonprofit organization has played host to 10 Pfizer employees. “Our fellows have been able to assist with marketing our programs, developing communication strategies, disseminating lessons learned.”

Tapping Talent

Overseas programs have their roots in efforts like UPS’s Community Internship Program and Xerox’s Social Service Leave initiative.

UPS’s program, started in 1968, was designed in part to develop leaders. It pairs about 35 senior-level managers each year with nonprofit groups for month-long assignments so the managers will gain awareness of social problems and, ideally, become better at their jobs by being more sensitive to employees’ needs. Most American employees of UPS work at nonprofit groups in the United States, and the company has also sent employees from Europe and the Pacific to serve at U.S. nonprofit groups.

Xerox’s program, which began three years later, grants up to a year of paid leave to about 10 employees annually. The program encourages workers to stay in the communities where the company has operations.

Both corporations, as well as Pfizer, have recently joined with a San Francisco nonprofit group, BuildingBlocks International, to share their perspective with other companies interested in adding similar programs to their philanthropy. Pfizer also helped Becton, Dickinson and Company, a medical-technology business in Franklin Lakes, N.J., start a service program this year to help combat HIV/AIDS in Zambia.

The volunteer programs don’t simply allow companies to do good — they also give them a chance to expand the skills of their own employees. Cisco Systems, a technology company in San Jose, Calif., which started a pilot Leadership Fellows Program in 2002, is particularly frank about this objective: It sees the program as a chance to tap rising stars and throw them into difficult situations where they will learn about the importance of teamwork, flexibility, even having a sense of humor, says Michael Yutrzenka, executive director of the Cisco Systems Foundation.

The program grew from a project started in 2001, after the technology-industry bust, that placed employees who had been laid off from Cisco in volunteer positions at nonprofit groups. Cisco workers in the program were paid one-third of their old salaries.

While most participants work at U.S. nonprofit groups, the company is expanding the program internationally and recently sent its first employee overseas, to do information-technology and human-resources management for the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

PricewaterhouseCoopers sees its Project Ulysses program, started in 2001, as fulfilling a similar role: preparing top employees for positions of leadership. It sends about 12 high-level employees each year for two-month stints working for overseas nonprofit groups.

“For us, it’s not a corporate volunteering or social-responsibility initiative only,” says Ralf Schneider, partner for global management talent at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “The next generation of leaders will probably have to be more aware of a broader business agenda, doing things beyond the short-term profit line, and will need to bring a broader perspective to how they manage and lead a firm, including how to get dialogue going with a broader range of stakeholders.”

Global Reach

Beyond developing leadership, companies say their service programs often help strengthen many aspects of their philanthropy programs.

Pfizer says its fellows program has helped it strengthen ties to nonprofit groups, governments, and multigovernmental organizatons. Ms. Luff, Pfizer’s director of international philanthropy, says, “Two days after the tsunami hit, a couple of us were on the phone with the World Health Organization and Unicef. They said, ‘We need people — doctors, sanitation experts, engineers.’ And because we had the internal policies and procedures and the infrastructure to deliver skilled people, we were able to respond very quickly with top-notch folks.”

Pfizer found that it had to intensify its collaboration with nonprofit groups to make the fellows program work, says Ms. Luff. It experimented with several approaches to placing fellows in service projects, then realized it needed to give nonprofit groups a big say. Nonprofit groups provide the company with a description of the skills they seek in a fellow, and then Pfizer issues a company-wide call for talent. Nonprofit groups then sit on a committee with Pfizer officials to pick the fellows.

Ms. Wafer, for one, is committed to maintaining close ties with the Ugandan charity she helped. Its chief executive officer traveled to talk with Pfizer officials shortly after she returned, and Ms. Wafer is now planning to give out local crafts to call attention to the organization.

Helping people in Uganda has also become a family affair. After seeing Ms. Wafer’s photographs from the fellowship, her 78-year-old mother wanted her own way to help, and so she and a group of neighbors started collecting shoes to donate to people in Mbale. They recently mailed 10 boxes.