When Melissa Ghislanzoni became a lawyer, she intended to change the world.
“I went to law school wanting to make a difference,” she says. “I really love academia but am personally more satisfied with creating concrete results,” she says. And though the 30-year-old feels her work as a corporate lawyer with Fraser Milner Casgrain in Toronto allows her to do just that for clients, she wanted something more.
That chance came last summer, when Ms. Ghislanzoni learned her firm was participating in Leave for Change, a program run by Uniterra, an international volunteer initiative run by the Canadian International Development Agency, World University Service of Canada and the Centre for International Studies and Cooperation.
Leave for Change gives Canadians the opportunity to volunteer their professional skills in developing countries for two to four weeks. It's the only short-term program in Canada in which participants aren't required to leave their jobs for an extended time.
At Fraser Milner Casgrain, or FMC, participants have to use their vacation to participate in the program, but the firm then gives back half of that vacation time. Outside of that, the cost of the program to the firm for each participant is about $5,000.
“I was so excited,” says Ms. Ghislanzoni, who rushed to look at the Leave for Change website to see what opportunities were available for those with a legal skill set. “I saw a posting in Botswana and immediately knew I wanted to apply for it,” she says.
Her company's involvement in the program came as no surprise to Ms. Ghislanzoni. “We have a strong tradition within the firm of corporate social responsibility,” says FMC chief executive officer Chris Pinnington. “It runs the gamut from supporting local charities to strong involvement with the United Way campaign,” he says. The firm also participates in the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council's mentoring program.
FMC's desire to participate in Leave for Change, Mr. Pinnington says, is also tied to a very real business need to diversify. A team that's diverse – through inclusive hiring and the international exposure offered through Leave for Change – better equips the firm to compete in an increasingly diverse environment.
“There's a pretty important business dimension to all of this, in terms of being responsible to our clients and aligning ourselves with their expectations of diversity,” he says.
The firm allocated $40,000 for participation in Leave for Change, allowing eight staff members to take part. Fourteen employees completed Uniterra's application. Rather than narrowing the list to eight, the firm's human resources department handed the applications off to Uniterra, which then chose the eight participants based on the best matches between postings and applicants. In the end, seven employees participated, including Ms. Ghislanzoni, who volunteered in Botswana late last year, and her Edmonton colleague and marketing specialist Jenn Muir, who returned from a three-week post in Vietnam in January. (The eighth staff member became ill and could not travel.)
Both Ms. Ghislanzoni and Ms. Muir say the program not only had a profound effect on their personal lives but on their professional lives as well.
Jenn Muir, of law firm Fraser Milner Casgrain
Ms. Muir, who went to the Vietnamese province of Binh Thuan, acted as a marketing and communications adviser to a community college, with the mandate of facilitating workshops focused on marketing and communications, as well as to meet and meeting strategically with management at the school. “We're such a deadline driven society here, and everything is based on time,” Ms. Muir says. “At the college, time was important, but there was a much stronger balance between work and life. Now at work, I try to focus on taking time to enjoy what's going on around me.”
