Ms. Akiko Kawamura

Three years ago, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership gave a grant to the Points of Light Foundation (POLF) to partner with the Tokyo Voluntary Action Center (TVAC) for joint implementation of a project to enhance US – Japan collaboration on volunteerism.  The POLF coordinates a network of volunteer centers in the United States, and the TVAC has a network of 2600 volunteer centers in Japan, thus making them appropriate choices for such a project.

The goal of the project was to identify best practices on volunteerism in both countries in order to tackle the shared challenge that nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) face in recruiting volunteers.  NGO and NPO volunteer recruitment has recently become more difficult in Japan due to the fact that Japanese stay-at-home housewives, who traditionally comprised the core of the volunteer sector, have been declining in number due to aging or entry into the workforce.  As a result, attention in Japan is now being turned to an alternative group of people, namely current and retired corporate employees.  This has raised questions about the kinds of volunteer activities that busy working people can realistically take part in. As an outgrowth of this, there has been a call for more research on corporate volunteerism and more program development within the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Learning From Exchanges: The United States and Japan

In recognition of this need, in June 2003 four volunteer centers in Japan—from Osaka, Shizuoka, Tachikawa-shi in Tokyo and TVAC—participated in the National Conference on Community Volunteering and National Service in Washington D.C.  Representatives from the centers took part in workshops on such themes as corporate – NPO partnership and the development of volunteer programs for busy corporate employees.  At the conference, TVAC was surprised by the wealth of effective, practical examples of partnership between corporations and NPOs, as well as of corporate volunteer activities in the United States, which were compiled into various manuals for participants’ use.

Another workshop was held to introduce to Americans the efforts of volunteer centers in Japan.  TVAC introduced the IT Volunteer Program, a project supported by  Microsoft  and Hewlett-Packard to create a diverse corporate volunteer team in order to teach basic computer skills to survivors of domestic violence. There were many people in the room who were in charge of CSR at American companies that have branches in Japan, and they voiced their desire for help in encouraging volunteer activities among their staff in Japan.

In October of that same year, staff from five volunteer centers in the United States, including the POLF, came to Japan to conduct a seminar aimed at Japanese companies, volunteer centers, and NPOs in order to encourage corporate volunteerism and recruitment of a diverse pool of volunteers.  The American staff offered examples of volunteer activity structures that are easy for busy corporate employees to take part in, such as one-time or non-regular (episodic) volunteering, family volunteering or volunteering through the Internet (e-volunteering). They also gave detailed descriptions of ways to encourage volunteerism among staff within companies. 

In the past, the predominant view in Japan had been that there were few opportunities for corporations and NPOs to collaborate with regard to volunteerism. However, speakers at the workshop offered a variety of examples of programs that can make corporate participation easier, thereby breaking down the barrier between the two sectors and effectively utilizing the particular abilities of corporate employees.

These conferences and seminars in both the U.S. and Japan proved a useful learning opportunity for TVAC, which has developed various corporate volunteer programs of its own, using many of the lessons learned from the conferences.

Development of Corporate Volunteer Programs in Japan

Less than a week after TVAC returned from the United States, we received a phone call from the person in charge of Community Relations at GE in Japan, who explained that the GE’s Corporate Citizenship representative who attended the workshop in the United States had encouraged her to work with TVAC to create a new corporate volunteer program in Japan.  Through a series of meetings, we discussed with GE current community needs and how these might match the resources of GE employees. This discussion led to the creation of the Be an Inventor for the Community project. 

It is important to note that this project took place soon after an “Integrated Study” was introduced in primary and secondary schools throughout Japan in 2002.   In this course, students identify social and community problems themselves and look for solutions through experiential learning.  However, given that there is only one teacher per class in Japan, it is difficult for teachers to take their students outside of school, and it is not easy to elicit every student’s concerns and ideas. 

In response to this situation, the Be an Inventor for the Community project was created by both GE and TVAC.  GE employees work on a daily basis to identify social needs, discuss and facilitate the development of services to address those needs, and make relevant presentations.  As part of the project, teams of one or two GE employees and five or six students then to go out into local communities to help students identify community needs on their own and follow up with group discussions and presentations.

At the time that the project was introduced, there were no existing examples of large numbers of corporate employees taking part in school programs. TVAC introduced the project in six schools and worked to build mutual understanding between the schools and corporations.  During the first year, roughly 120 corporate employees took part in the project.  By all accounts, students and corporate volunteers were able to undertake meaningful work.  Furthermore, teachers and parents were surprised at the corporate employees’ teaching abilities. In addition, the corporate volunteers found that they were better able to understand the circumstances of the students, the schools, and the communities, and they have now begun looking for ways to more actively support them. The project has also been covered extensively by television news and other media outlets.

Since the introduction of the project, news of it has spread among schools and corporate employees, leading to rapid expansion each year.  Now in its fourth year, we are expecting 24 schools and other educational institutions and roughly 1000 employees from around the country to take part in the project.  We are also taking on a new challenge by placing a deaf GE employee and her support staff as volunteers in a school for the students with hearing disabilities.  The lessons that we have learned from volunteer centers in the United States have been indispensable in the development and maintenance of this project.

Requests From Many Companies

TVAC has also been approached by a large number of companies with requests for advice in developing volunteer activities for their employees. The advice that companies are seeking ranges from requests for examples of corporate volunteer activities, to help in setting up and managing a company’s own unique program, to assistance in planning and implementing lectures and experiential learning on volunteerism.  Recently, we have also received many requests from companies for help integrating volunteer activities into training programs for new employees and young labor union members.

As an example of this, last year for the first time NTT East’s new employee training program offered roughly 300 new employees the opportunity to work with more than 70 people from the community by volunteering for one day. The volunteer work included helping people with disabilities, foreign residents, mothers with small children, and organizations dealing with issues such as disaster relief and environmental protection.  For two years in a row, more than 98 percent of the new employees who participated in the program have responded through surveys that the program was either “meaningful” or “somewhat meaningful.”  Through these kinds of activities, employees get the opportunity to interact with people in the community with whom they otherwise would not have contact, and they are exposed to important issues in their communities.  Moreover, these young employees begin to think about what they can do for the community as individual citizens and as corporate individual employees.

Another interesting facet of the new volunteerism concerns Japanese men. In the past, Japanese men have generally spent the majority of their time inside their companies, with few outside links to their communities.  This has made it difficult for some working men to become a part of their communities after retiring from their jobs.  However, the new community volunteer experience that corporate employees undertake, even if it is only a few times a year, brings with it significant merit for the individual employee, the company, and the community as a whole and strengthens men’s links to the community.

Conclusion

CSR issues have become increasingly prominent in Japan in recent years.  As individual corporations seek to find ways in which they can make contributions to society, volunteer centers can play an important role in linking corporations and their employees to local communities.  As this dynamic grows in the future, it will be important to develop more volunteer activities, not only in Tokyo, but throughout the country.

In closing, I would like to offer my heartfelt thanks to CGP and to the volunteer centers in the United States for supporting our efforts and being the driving force behind our work to encourage corporate volunteerism in Japan.