To bring a little light to the recent June Gloom, we would like to take a moment to recognize Nancy Xu as this month’s featured volunteer. Nancy is a program manager at Microsoft for the Widows Design Studio and first got involved with Jolkona through the giving campaign events we planned at Microsoft in 2010. She has been a volunteer ever since. Over the years, Nancy has worked on several projects for Jolkona, including partner trip coordination and creative storytelling. However, most recently, Nancy has been working tirelessly with two other stellar volunteers: Punit Java, and Pavan Potaraju on building our first Windows phone app called Change by Jolkona - an innovative mobile app that lets you track the progress of a habit you wish to change while making a positive impact in the world through Jolkona’s diverse range of partner projects. Nancy was in charge of the app design and some of the management behind it. The app will be going live shortly so stay tuned!

Before working on the design for the Windows mobile app, Nancy volunteered on several video projects for Jolkona, including our most recent production for our Hulu PSA. Prior to that, she also helped produce and direct our Kids Give Back video and our short video Why Give. Nancy is a tremendous example of how young professionals can use their passion and professional skill set to give back. By pursuing her passion of storytelling, over the years she has helped Jolkona tell our story and those of our partners. She embodies what volunteering should be about: aligning your skills and passions to make a positive impact and further an organization’s mission.

Here’s what some of our volunteers have said about working with Nancy:

“Nancy is a wonderful volunteer for Jolkona. She has so much passion for her work and has helped develop amazing media campaigns, such as spearheading the new Jolkona PSA spot for Hulu. Despite having a full-time job at Microsoft, she pledges much of her time actively volunteering and participating in so many events and partner visits. Nancy is an indispensible asset and Jolkona is lucky to have her on the team.”
- Rekha Ravindran

“Nancy is a priceless asset to Jolkona. She has boundless passion for Jolkona and we have always been able to count on her to get the job done – and how! She is a big reason for our successful partner visits in East Africa and South America in the last 2 years – it would not have been possible without her! Her significant contribution to our Hulu video, other video editing projects, and the case study (in business club style) she did with the students at Generation Rwanda in December 2010 exemplify her extraordinary ability to take on a challenge and do it well!
Working with Nancy over the past 2+ years has been an incredible experience. We are lucky to have her as part of Jolkona!”
- Pavan Potaraju

“Nancy is super passionate about her video/media work for Jolkona. I had the opportunity to travel with Nancy to South America, especially in Peru where it was just the two of us. She is deeply understanding and respectful of other cultures, as well as compassionate. She is also delightfully friendly and blissfully easy to get along with. When we interacted with a Partner in Peru, Nancy was exceptionally well-prepared, exploring all angles of their work with her intelligent and well-thought out questions – I was most impressed!”
- Chi Do

One of the things I’ve come to admire and respect most about Nancy over the years is her fastidious organization and supreme ability to execute on projects, which I’m sure she’s garnered from her Program Manager position at Microsoft. These skills have been clearly demonstrated on all the Jolkona projects she has volunteered with. Jolkona is remarkably fortunate to have the dedication and support of so many amazing volunteers, and Nancy is no exception. Thank you, Nancy, for being one of our rockstar volunteers and a stalwart advocate for Jolkona.

Are you in interested in volunteering? Do you want to use your passions and skills to help build a new generation of philanthropists? Find out more information by emailing us at contact@jolkona.org. You can also keep up with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Sorry to let the cat out of the bag so soon, but I think the straight answer to this question is no, Amazon does not have an obligation to philanthropy. However, before I go any further let me get two things clear: yes, we do have Amazon employees who volunteer at Jolkona; no, I’m not one of them.

In case you were on the moon (with Jeff Bezos’s private aerospace company perhaps), the issue of Amazon’s apparent absence in the philanthropic life of its hometown (Seattle) featured in an article belonging to a wider four-part series by the Seattle Times questioning some of the company’s practices.

View from an Amazon office building, South Lake Union, Seattle. Photo credit: Flickr, Cliff Hung

First of all, I don’t really wish to comment on the other issues regarding Amazon’s ethics of business, mainly because capitalism doesn’t strike me as a particularly ethical system in the first place. It’s a paradoxical argument, in my view. And secondly, because we’re talking about philanthropy here, not business. Which is precisely my point.

The truth is, a company has legal obligations to its shareholders, employees, customers, and…. well that’s about it.

At the heart of philanthropy is not corporate business. At the heart of philanthropy is the individual promoting the well-being of man-kind. Businesses, though, are about people, and so one could argue that it would be beneficial for them to care about the well-being of the community and people they serve.

But as we’ve seen the foundation of almost every business is a visionary individual. Likewise, the foundation of almost every non-profit is not thanks to a corporation, but to a single person with a single mission. A case in point, of course, is our own CEO, Adnan Mahmud, who started Jolkona whilst simultaneously holding down a full time product manager position at Microsoft.

Microsoft, though, is a good example of a large corporate business that does encourage philanthropic participation from its employees, offering donation matching, volunteer matching, and pro-bono software to non-profits, among other company wide philanthropic initiatives. The question, then, becomes can businesses like Amazon become serious participants in encouraging individuals towards philanthropy and they themselves as a company promoting the well-being of others? Absolutely they can. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they indeed should.

According to a study by Corporate Citizenship 85% of Americans have a more positive image of a product or a company when it supports a cause they care about. Whilst 79% of Americans say they would switch from one brand to another if the other brand is associated with a good cause. It’s hardly rocket science, but in a nutshell: a company is likely to make more money if they are seen to be connected to philanthropic causes. Tom’s shoes is an excellent example of this.

The gain for Amazon, then, in theory, should be greater profitability. But if philanthropy equates to profitability, then one might ask why has Amazon not done more for philanthropic initiatives in its own community. Clearly, though, they’ve assessed what is most profitable for them, and at the moment they seem to be saying corporate philanthropy is not the direction they want to go in. You can’t criticize them for that. Can we criticize them ethically, though? We can question them, yes. But I still don’t believe corporate businesses have obligations to philanthropy. Whether or not, though, Amazon will suffer an eventual consumerist backlash is yet to be determined.

The possibility remains that if Amazon becomes more philanthropic it could improve its own bottom line, which in turn would be a win win situation for shareholders and the community.

Does Amazon have a obligation to philanthropy? No. Might Amazon benefit from taking part in philanthropic activities? Very possibly, yes. Could Amazon have a big impact on the philanthropic community? Absolutely they could.  But again, I personally believe philanthropy is more about the individual, not corporate business. Non-profits need and value the help of corporate businesses, but we must rely on ourselves to better the world around us.

Don’t ask what Amazon can do for philanthropy. Ask what you yourself can do for philanthropy.

Be the change you want to see in the world here.

This post was written by Gabriel St. John.  He is a volunteer with Jolkona and contributes and manages the blog.  He has a Masters of Research degree in European Languages and Culture. He hails all the way from Cornwall, England, where he studied at the University of Exeter.

Motrin

On Monday afternoon I had the opportunity to volunteer at Global Washington‘s How Girls Can Save the World event. Thanks to a generous donation from Microsoft all 500+ guests were able to attend without any cost. The afternoon had two speakers, Geena Davis of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, and Chris Grumm of Chris Grumm Consulting Group; as well as a moderator, former CEO of the Women’s Funding Network and moderator, Andrea Taylor of Microsoft.

The talks were a fascinating confluence of women in media and women in economics, portraying where these worlds intersect and, although vastly diverse, how they are at times inter-dependable. Extremely memorable was Geena Davis’s constant emphasizing of the word feminist. She stressed that we were not be afraid of it as all it means is to believe in equal rights for women.

The event was incredibly engaging and a number of questions were asked at the end. It was refreshing to see young girls (maybe 12 or 13 years old) asking such difficult but pertinent questions. One girl, who was in middle school, asked how she could engage in conversation with her friends about women empowerment and hyper-sexualization. This question and many others were enlighteningly answered by both Geena and Chris.

Some quotes from the evening:

Chris Grumm: “We need system change to help women/girls. Celebrate all success but be five steps ahead.”
Chris Grumm: “The difference between the women of the Global South and the Global North – women in the North are already empowered and the women of the South need more help with empowerment and business opportunities.”

Geena Davis: “Female characters in G-rated movies wear the same revealing clothes as female characters in R-rated movies.”
Geena Davis: “We’re due for a resurgence of the women’s movement!”

Eye-opening statistics that were mentioned:

• 80% of the media consumed worldwide comes from the United States. This is the message we’re exporting.
• If we add women to media at the rate of the last 20 years, it will take 700 years to meet parity. 500 years for congress.
• Teenage girls’ #1 ambition is “reality TV star”.
• There is typically 1 woman for every 3 males in TV/movies/media.
• Research shows the more hours of TV a girl watches, the fewer options she imagines for her life.

Follow #girlssavetheworld on Twitter and you can take a look at the conversation we all had. Tom Paulson at KPLU also wrote a excellent summary of the evening on his blog, Humanosphere.

With our current matching campaign, Give to Girls (#Give2Girls) we can all make a difference and help empower the next generation of women leaders.

Empower women the world over here.