by Fabio Balboni

09 November 2007

Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago: At first glance, business and volunteerism do not look like the closest friends on earth. This was one of the first questions I was asked when I took my assignment as a UNV Specialist in corporate social responsibility.

Now that my assignment is almost completed, I feel much more comfortable in answering that question. Now, I recognize the great potential that private businesses have in the promotion of volunteerism, both by financially supporting volunteer-involving organizations and by promoting volunteerism among its employees.

Promoting volunteerism in its workforce has become a key aspect of my training and seminars for the local companies: making the employees the best advocate of the company is an essential aspect of doing business. Empowering the employees with time and resources to become actively engaged in their communities is the best way to make them proud of being part of an organization. Being a volunteer myself, I believe that providing employees with the appropriate incentives so that they can contribute to the development of their communities, can foster a broader awareness of the social issues in the country and of the role each of us can play.
 
Trinidad and Tobago present the ideal environment for my task: the private sector is booming and local businessmen are eager to receive suggestions and recommendations on how to contribute to the well-being of their peers (in every seminar when a local businessman tells the story of his life and how he made the first $1000 there is someone in the audience who is moved and starts to cry). This leads me me say something about Trinidad and Tobago: every time you come to a new place, no matter how much you have read about it, there’s always something that you didn’t expect. In Trinidad and Tobago there was a lot of this! I thought I was going to a Caribbean island and I saw no tropical beaches around, I thought I was going to help the economic development and the economy was booming, I thought I was heading to some exotic destination and I saw the same fast food chain everywhere. After a while, I realized that this was just another way in which life was preparing me to learn something new: I allowed myself to be surprised each and every day, and now I must say leaving will be really hard.