January 11, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
PRESS CLIPPINGSBy Sam Kean
Many corporations have enhanced their philanthropic efforts by encouraging employees to spend business days volunteering. But because time is too valuable to waste, those businesses also demand that charities start proving they are worth the investment, reports Red Herring (December 25).
The article recounts stories of a vice president at Salesforce.com who spent afternoons in a soup kitchen his first week on the job and of programmers at Yahoo who received paid sabbaticals to develop a Web site for a small antipoverty charity.
Both companies monitor the effectiveness of charities they support and can hold them accountable for poor performances by withdrawing money or volunteers. That implicit threat drew criticism from nonprofit officials, who worry that charities would compromise themselves to meet the demands of corporate donors.
The issue of Red Herring also contains an article about the rise of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which is poised to become one of the largest foundations in the country thanks to increased giving among residents there, especially people in the technology business, and because of its recent merger with a nearby fund, the Peninsula Community Foundation.
