Business Class
The Global
(Corporate) Citizen
Charity doesn’t have
to begin at home.
Learn how attorneys
and business
executives are using
their expertise to
improve the world
BY JOANNE CRONRATH BAMBERGER
When Mona Clayton approached her
supervisors for their advice on finding a project on which she could hone
and develop her leadership skills, she
didn’t know that she would find herself
halfway around the world, involved in
one of the hardest ventures she’d ever
accepted. But she didn’t bat an eye
when her employer offered to send her
to Cambodia for two months as part of
an international pro bono project, even
though that meant time away from her
paying clients.
In 2005 Clayton, a forensic accountant
and a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers,
took a two-month break from her usual
duties and traveled to Phnom Penh to
work with a nongovernmental organization called Hagar International, a group
that gives refuge to women and children
who have been abused in human trafficking schemes and provides them with job
training to start new lives.
Notwithstanding demanding
careers and the long hours typically
required to climb the corporate ladder,
increasing numbers of professionals
around the country are electing to
spend months in exotic and foreign
locales, as Clayton did, as a way of
becoming more connected with the
growing global professional community they find themselves inhabiting.
Traditionally, the pro bono work of
professional firms has trended toward
providing local services to those who
could not afford to pay for them. But as
firms and corporations have expanded their presence around the world,
they’re looking more closely at what
it means to be global citizens, providing
and supporting efforts to become involved in parts of the world where they
are newcomers.
Clayton put her usual work temporarily on hold so she could provide her
financial expertise—which many here
have access to and take for granted
—where her services could have a
greater impact, an opportunity that
also would allow her to work on developing her own leadership skills.
Clayton’s trip to Cambodia was part of
a PricewaterhouseCoopers-sponsored
program called Project Ulysses, a
corporate philanthropy project developed by the mega-accounting firm
with two goals in mind: to give back to
the global community and to create
opportunities for increased leadership
experience among its partners.
Profitable Advice
Clayton spent eight weeks in Cambodia
working with Hagar Design, the business
arm of Hagar International, providing
business and consulting advice to help
Hagar Design increase its profits for
the handmade products it sells—the
products that help fund Hagar’s broader
mission to help women and children.
“We helped them determine the
best price to sell their products at a
