Business News

Pitney Bowes Launches Global Volunteer Month

Wednesday 06. April 2011 - Pitney Bowes Encourages Employees to Support Literacy Initiatives in Their Local Communities

Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) announced the launch of a new Global Volunteer Month program to engage employee volunteers in fun literacy skill development activities to help close the achievement gap and get students excited about reading. Building on the Pitney Bowes Foundation’s support of Reading Is Fundamental, Pitney Bowes plans to offer Volunteer Tool Kits that provide all of the materials and supplies needed to implement the Share the Message: READ! Volunteer Activity Guides and to distribute books for the children to take home. The three guides — Animal Communications, Languages of the World, and Communicating Through the Arts – each feature a children’s book and related arts and crafts activities that are appropriate for students in grades K-5.
Pitney Bowes employees are encouraged to reach out to their local school or community center to conduct in-school or after-school literacy activities with young students using the guides. Each activity can be conducted in less than an hour. Volunteers will read the featured children’s book to the students, and then conduct the related arts and craft project. At the end of each session, students will be able to select their own book to take home to read from a selection of related age-appropriate books.
Pitney Bowes has confirmed that employee volunteer teams in at least five U.S. cities will participate in the 2011 Global Volunteer Month program featuring the RIF Volunteer Activity Guides. Employee volunteer teams in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India have also committed to adapting the Share the Message: READ! Volunteer Activity Guides to meet their local needs. Employee volunteers outside of the U.S. will work with local charity partners to source the materials and supplies and age-appropriate books, the costs of which will be covered by Team Volunteer Grants from the Pitney Bowes Foundation. This collective effort advances the company’s philanthropic focus on employee community involvement and literacy and education initiatives that help to close the academic achievement gap.
As Pitney Bowes’ Executive Sponsor, Chuck Johnson, Vice President, Human Resources, Mailing Solutions Management, states “the great part about Share the Message: READ! is that employees can make a meaningful difference in the lives of children in a very short time. Employees will have all the materials they need to create an effective and engaging learning experience for these young students. The children benefit from the program in numerous ways, and our employees have fun while building stronger communities and helping develop the next generation.”
Pitney Bowes and the Pitney Bowes Foundation have been proud supporters of Reading Is Fundamental since 2004. In 2009, the Pitney Bowes Foundation built on Pitney Bowes’ extensive history of RIF support by funding the creation of the Share the Message: READ! communication resource guide and accompanying book collections, which provided sets of high-quality books for 50 RIF sites in Indianapolis and New York City. Pitney Bowes then sponsored a series of related family literacy nights in Corona CA, Atlanta GA, Washington DC, and Dallas TX. More than 100 Pitney Bowes employees volunteered at these events, celebrating reading with more than 2,200 attendees. Because the events were so highly rated by students, parents, teachers, school administrators and volunteers, the Pitney Bowes Foundation decided to fund the new communications-themed volunteer activity guides and related toolkits to enable employee volunteers in virtually any company location to lead similar projects in their communities.