”It’s a win-win-win situation,” says Claire Johnson, a PhD student at the University of Adelaide who is researching corporate volunteering. She believes companies are turning away from sponsorship in favour of corporate volunteering. ”I think people can be cynical about sponsorship. The idea that the company can give money to a group and get advertising in return – it just looks like a media opportunity.”
The director of research at the University of New South Wales’s centre for social impact, Les Hems, believes the future of corporate volunteering lies more with skilled workers, who can offer their expertise rather than just a willing pair of hands.
”The days have gone when you got 50 sets of overalls, 50 tins of paint and painted the walls of a school,” he says.
”Corporations tend to identify what community groups could benefit from their experience. People actually use their core competencies, which they have learnt in their jobs to help organisations.
”Why would you get an IT professional in to paint walls when they could overhaul your computer system or improve your website?”
At Reverse Garbage in Marrickville, a not-for-profit group that diverts waste from landfill and sells it, it is often the highly skilled white-collar volunteers who want to get their hands dirty.
”You’d be surprised how many lawyers want to do the labouring work,” the development director at Reverse Garbage, Christine Harris-Smyth, says. ”They actually want to do something different from their paid work in the office. The last thing they want to do is the paper work.”
One of the challenges for the group is training volunteers, which can be time consuming and costly, which is why they were delighted when the National Australia Bank approached them and offered the business expertise of its staff for free.
”You’ll get bankers to come in and fix up the paving but they can also do the accounts,” the general manager at Reverse Garbage, Narelle Mantle, says. ”But the important thing is they come to us with skills that we don’t have. We don’t have to spend time or money training volunteers up. It’s been really positive for us.”