c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Nothing in Jim Shippey’s career at United Parcel Service suggested he would spend the end of a hot summer day crouched under a bridge in New York’s South Bronx section, grilling surplus prison food with a nun.

The nun, Sister Lauria, was his favorite part of a four-week program UPS runs to change the way its managers think about the very poor. For Shippey, this meant work that ranged from delivering food to a homeless transvestite heroin addict, to improving efficiency at a center where homeless people bring cans they’ve collected for redemption.

“It’s a question of dignity and the way you treat people,” said Shippey, who normally is a business manager for UPS in California’s Sacramento Valley. “The perception I had of people picking up cans before is they were lazy and didn’t want to work.”

At the can redemption center, he learned that necessarily wasn’t true. “Places like this and the Bronx have really pushed that in our faces,” he said.

In a mix of altruism and marketing, the public face of corporate philanthropy has changed from check writing to rolled-up sleeves.

“There are strategic reasons for this,” said Jeff Wilklow, vice president of development for the Points of Light Foundation, which grew out of the effort by ex-President George Bush to increase volunteerism. “Some are as basic as reaching target markets.”

At AT&T, the AT&T Cares program gives employees a day off to do volunteer work. It is partially a strategy to make the company appear local, by doing work in communities where it has workers, said John Schneider, vice president of communications at Points of Light. AT&T said it donates about $20 million worth of work hours.

“The days off are really great publicity,” said Myra Alperson, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at City University of New York. “They do help the corporate image.”

Since the volunteer summit run by Gen. Colin Powell last year, “there’s been a lot of emphasis on companies having people volunteer,” said Jerome Himmelstein, author of “Looking Good and Doing Good: Corporate Philanthropy and Corporate Power,” and a sociology professor at Amherst College.

About 72 percent of companies have a formal volunteer program, according to a recent survey of 89 companies by the Consulting Network, a management consulting firm in Vienna, Va.

UPS has sent top managers for a month of living and working in poor neighborhoods ever since 1968 and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King and a summer of urban rioting. It started heavily publicizing the program after last summer’s UPS strike.

“We were the quiet company for a number of years,” said Don Wofford, UPS’ community relations coordinator. “When the public doesn’t hear what good you do, they have a tendency to think you’re not doing anything at all.”

The UPS program has had results at the Henry Street Settlement, the agency it works with in New York.

Two UPS “community interns” started a job-training program that has resulted in 40 people from Henry Street being placed in jobs at UPS.

“They’re teaching us something about discipline,” said Elinor Polansky, chief administrator at Henry Street. “They’re role modeling here. A lot of our children don’t have fathers.”

A criticism of some of these programs is that they take people with special skills, such as accounting and computer programming, and send them to paint a school or plant a garden, Alperson said.

Electronic Data Systems is one company that lends its people to nonprofits that need their skills, she said. So an EDS accountant working at a community group would improve the group’s accounting system.

In some cases, employees pick the volunteer work.

United Airlines started building Habitat for Humanity houses because that’s where their employees were already volunteering, said Mary Phelps, metro manager east for United. The company now has “build days” when it buses United volunteers from the airport to a house.

“It’s offering an opportunity for our employees to work together on something,” she said.

Some companies send money where their people are already working. J.P. Morgan in New York gives grants to nonprofits where employees volunteer, said Alperson.

Companies are getting creative with their service. Arthur Andersen is recruiting alongside Teach for America, an organization that puts graduating college seniors to work teaching in depressed neighborhoods. Candidates chosen by both can defer the Andersen job for two years while they work at Teach for America.

IR END SIMON