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Leaders Let The People Of Flint Down, So Pro Bono Volunteers Stepped Up

This article is more than 7 years old.

With Pro Bono Week 2016 upon us next week (October 23 - 29), it’s time to celebrate the value of this unique form of volunteering.

Taproot Foundation, an organization that connects nonprofits and social change organizations with skilled volunteers who share their expertise pro bono, has built Pro Bono Week into a worldwide initiative that promotes pro bono services and encourages ever more companies and individuals to get involved throughout the year. Pro Bono Week is a global campaign that celebrates and activates pro bono service across all professions that use their talents to make a difference.

When you take a closer look at the benefits of pro bono services, it becomes clear why this type of volunteering has become the fastest growing domestic volunteer program over the past three years. The hourly value of pro bono dwarfs that of traditional volunteering and the professional development opportunities to employees provides significant value back to their companies.

The impact of pro bono and skills-based volunteering is illuminated by looking at how PepsiCo took steps to alleviate the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In this instance, the best way that PepsiCo could help was not just by sending bottles of Aquafina but by leveraging the expertise of its employees. Their powerful example highlights the process by which skills-based volunteering can be quickly organized in a disaster to address unmet needs, and how employees who apply the know-how of their jobs can make a profound difference.

Photo credit: PepsiCo

A Crisis Unfolds

We were all horrified to read the headlines about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan starting last January. The water flowing from Flint’s taps, we learned, was not just unusable, it was dangerous. As developments emerged, it became clear that the disaster didn’t just happen out of the blue; the underlying problems stretched back years. When the government failed to act or even acknowledge the problem, what ensued was a total breakdown of trust between the community and its local, state and some federal leaders.

Something had to be done. So concerned private and nonprofit organizations came together to address short and long-term recovery efforts.

The good news: with Flint residents needing a massive supply of bottles of water in order to drink, cook and bathe for months on end, generous contributions of bottled water came from companies, foundations and individuals across the world. The bad news: Flint had insufficient warehousing space and an inefficient distribution system to manage these bottles.

Enter Points of Light, an international nonprofit dedicated to engaging more people and resources in solving serious social problems through voluntary service, and PepsiCo, the global food and beverage powerhouse. Together, Points of Light helped PepsiCo organize and manage a project for skilled PepsiCo volunteers to review and recommend a feasible, affordable solution to address the water warehousing and distribution logistics in Flint. Points of Light brought together its skills-based volunteer project management and disaster response expertise to engage a Pepsi team in this critical and important work for Flint.

The objective was for the PepsiCorps team to assess the networks and capabilities of Flint organizations and propose an execution strategy that included a cost analysis for organizations to deliver bottled water most effectively to the community. A key focus point was the assessment of the newly created Help Centers as a point of storage and distribution of water, food and information to the community. The plan would need to be developed with awareness of and sensitivity to any Michigan state initiatives and would cover four main areas of concern: warehousing, the distribution network, logistics and delivery management, and implementation tasks.

A Plan Takes Shape

To get started, the PepsiCo team met with community leaders within Flint that had been working to develop Help Centers in the Long Term Recovery Group. As noted by Points of Light in its follow-up report, POL and PepsiCo together determined that three buckets of information would be vital to ensure the project was approached objectively: infrastructure, staffing and funding.

The first task for the team was to develop a ‘punch list’ of criteria that would determine which faith-based organizations could make good host sites for a Help Center. “We began with a list of eleven churches that expressed interest in using their facility to distribute food, water, and lead recovery resources,” the report notes. “The most striking features from these visits was the overwhelming passion that volunteers had for their community and the large variety of locations where water was being housed.”

With many of the facilities not fitting the criteria established, the team realized that they would have a difficult time keeping code for food distribution and developed a sketch that evolved over time for how the Help Centers could operate.

As the infrastructure of this operation was designed, the team addressed unexpected concerns. For example, they recognized that a critical aspect of the infrastructure design was delivering mental and physical health services to community members with lead poisoning. Because this service is more personal, the team believed that keeping personal care items inside the churches would help maintain dignity and privacy.

Over the course of the project, five Help Center locations were agreed upon; a staffing plan was developed in tandem with faith-based leaders; a volunteer scheduling calendar was created to make it easy for community members to sign up for days; Convoy of Hope committed 3 drivers for 12-18 months to deliver water to distribution sites; and the team developed a budget to open the doors and maintain operations for 1 year. The final budget was approved by PepsiCo, which believed these significant costs could be covered through their corporate and community partners interested in investing in the long-term health of Flint.

Lessons Were Learned

If your company is interested in playing a substantial role in disaster relief through skills-based volunteering, as PepsiCo did, consider the takeaways of the PepsiCo and Points of Light team for similar engagements in the future:

• The most important lesson for community development is to listen to the needs of the community and ask questions before recommending solutions. Community trust is important to establish to increase the success rate of a project.

• The community was incredibly supportive of having a group of consultants come in and recommend a strategy to address community problems. PepsiCo was able to serve as a neutral voice without an agenda during meetings and focus on their goal of delivering an effective model that best suited the needs of community members.

• The idea of promoting dignity within Help Centers was very important to the community; clients must be treated with respect and offered choice for products even if they are free.

• There was concern that these Help Centers would deliver different services based on the part of town they were located in. It was very important to ensure services were consistent and equitable for all community members.

• There are numerous politics at play when selecting sites for Help Centers; faith based wanted to ensure their communities were being served and they felt like they were the best voice for their neighborhood.

• On a short engagement, team familiarity and dynamics are of great importance. PepsiCo was able to hit the ground running and start building out project plans after 48 hours on the ground. The team had worked together in the past and were able to quickly divide tasks and understand one another’s work style.

• The shorter duration of an engagement, the more value in limiting participant numbers and encouraging the existence of established working relationships.

PepsiCo’s example shows that when you put employees at the center of a company’s social purpose efforts, particularly in a way that leverages their skills for maximum impact, the benefits to the company and community multiply exponentially. And this is never truer than during a disaster, when experience matters most.

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