SPI Technologies Foundation: Mounting corporate social responsibility across borders

The wave affecting corporations to take up programs to help stem social and poverty issues has hit both those in developing countries and the developed worlds. Efforts to uplift living conditions in many parts of the world have become global.

Thus, when SPI Technologies Inc, a world leader in business process outsourcing (BPO) embarked on corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs under the SPI Technologies Foundation, its employees who are stationed in various parts of the world took part like global troopers would.

Set up in the Philippines 25 years ago in 1980 with basic data encoding as primary service, SPI Technologies grew to provide business process outsourcing services to international corporations from 24 locations across the US, Europe and Asia. Of its 6,500 employees all over the world, 4,500 are Filipinos, providing service from its headquarters in Paranaque City, and additional facilities in Laguna, Cebu and Dumaguete.

The world was SPI’s platform when its employees joined the Children’s Hour program, rendering contributions amounting to one-hour’s pay complemented by counterpart funds from the company. With a huge workforce, its total contribution was on the top three among corporate contributors as most employees went beyond the one-hour contribution.

Building Homes

Conscious of the benefits that community relations work bring, a valued client based in Europe, Springer Science+Business Media, likewise chose to support SPI’s CSR programs by donating $25,000 during the company’s 25th Anniversary Celebration in the Philippines. An initial number of 25 homes have been pledged to be built in the "SPI-Springer Sunshine Village" under the Gawad Kalinga Program.

The ground breaking ceremony was held recently at St. Mary’s Compound, Brgy Moonwalk, Paranaque City, the chosen community, to uplift living conditions of select families. The involvement of zestful employee volunteers lends life-enhancing experiences and opportunities to develop their self-worth as members of society.

The Foundation endeavors to sustain the project through its continuos involvement with the community by establishing partnership in computer education,livelihood, health and environment stewardship.

SPI’s ‘Adopt-A-School’ Partnership Program

The Philippines was a natural setting for SPI Technologies Foundation’s initial "Adopt-A-School" partnership program in public elementary schools to help pupils truly understand and appreciate basic computer education.

Assistance in computer education for the youth is much related to the core of SPI’s business in BPO. Using computers, linked in a secure and efficiently networked information technology (IT) environment, SPI employees process information and materials to fulfill contracts to help clients in the worlds of publishing, legal, healthcare, financial and transaction processing services and retail.

The Foundation realized it could make a difference in computer education at the early years of elementary schooling. While there is a curriculum in place, very few public schools actually have the computers or the teachers for the training.

"As the country’s leading BPO services company, SPI relies on three fundamental pillars: people, process and technology. We know we have the people to teach the fundamentals in IT education, our own employees who have been strongly motivated in community outreach. We are committed to continuos training and development within our own organization. And we have the knowledge, skills, materials, and resources we have amassed in 25 years of business," Ernest Cu, president & CEO of SPI said

Cu added that s a global community with strong Filipino roots, "we believe it is in our own best interest to nurture a local pool that is IT-savvy, ensuring an educated workforce in the nation’s future and our own future staffing needs, cementing our leadership position in the global BPO market."

At the same time, the involvement with education is our way of "paying it forward." By promoting IT education, help is extended to the children of today, who will be the company’s workforce in the future.

A beehive of activities then commenced to relate with four schools in the vicinity of SPI’s Paranaque headquarters. A teaching guide for a two-year basic computer education course was made. Computers were donated, alongside school equipment and supplies whenever needed. In more cases than one, even airconditioned classrooms were build for computer learning.

Employee volunteers underwent training to teach basic computer courses as often as twice a day, three times a week. A coordination system was set-up to ensure that there were volunteers for the instruction periods.

Upon realizing that instructions were hampered in many cases by basic literacy deficiencies of the students, SPI Technologies Foundation helped the League of Corporate Foundations launch the "Sa Pagbasa, May Pagasa," a storybook drive that aims to develop a culture of reading and address the shortage of available reading materials in public elementary schools. A sub-program "Train the Teachers" also came about to buttress the learning goals. And when some of our students had to drop out due to financial problems, we conducted livelihood training workshops to help parents augment their incomes.

The Foundation also built its own Community Relations Center for teachers, parents, out-of-school youth, and students who want to learn more outside of school hours.

Employee volunteer teachers recounted their sense of fulfillment out of the experience of teaching the children. They never expected how rewarding it was to spend a few hours imparting knowledge to them, when they could have just spent their time strolling in the malls.

By 2004, the first batch of 170 students from the Rivera Village Elementary School in Pasay City made SPI proud and fulfilled and so did the 118 teachers who took the teachers’ program. There are presently 750 students participating in Basic Computer Training as the number of adopted public schools reached 20 across Metro Manila, Cavite and Tagaytay.

With expertise building up in the outreach front, the Foundation further scaled up its involvement in IT education by linking up with the national program entitled GILAS (Gearing Up Internet Literacy and Access for Students) whose goal is to provide Internet access and Internet literacy programs for all 5,433 Philippine public schools within the next five years.

Global Reach

"As a dynamic corporate citizen, we do not recognize but embrace our role in nation-building, particularly with programs that allow us to leverage our core competencies in the cause of Philippine progress," Cu said.

And as a corporation that employs people from many parts of the world, SPI Technologies is accorded a unique opportunity to put forward our corporate goals through community relations as we bridge understanding of people of various cultures that progress to achieve better living conditions as a common desire around the world. SPI harnesses this synergy by utilizing the resources of its global network team as well as the goodwill of its clients worldwide in realizing its vision of creating a better quality of life.