Making long-term investment count

Toray Plastics (America) Inc. gets a lot of workers from the University of Rhode Island, so when company executives became aware of the school’s need for new engineering facilities, helping out seemed a natural fit.
Last month Toray pledged $2 million toward the university’s planned construction of a new $125 million, 195,000-square-foot engineering building on its South Kingstown campus. (The contribution is contingent on voters passing a bond referendum to pay for the bulk of the new building in November.)
“When we realized how old the buildings are, I was concerned when prospective students go there and see it, then go to places like Virginia Tech, that they’re not going to want to go to URI,” said Richard Schloesser, president and CEO of North Kingstown-based Toray. “So with the approval of our board, we decided to give them a boost. We are extremely committed to the school, because we get 10 to 15 interns there every year, hire a lot of them and have many synergies with the university.”
While not every company pledges $2 million to a state university each year, Toray’s donation fits a broader pattern across New England and the country of a rise in corporate giving to education causes.
In 2012, U.S. corporations donated more to education, including both college and K-12, than any other charitable category, according to CECP (formerly the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy) in its annual Giving in Numbers report.
That was the first time education has drawn the most corporate charitable dollars, surpassing health and social services, since CECP began publishing the report in 2006.
In total, 29 percent of all corporate giving in 2012 went to education compared with 28 percent for health and social services. Community and economic development got 13 percent, civic and public affairs 5 percent, and arts and culture 5 percent to round out the top five.
Why has education become a more popular target of corporate giving in recent years? According to CECP authors, the bump in education donations was partly a result of several newly surveyed companies that gave big to schools in 2012.
But there was also a growing sense among executives that boosting education will eventually improve the quality of future job applicants and, as a result, their bottom lines.
“Companies that focused on education often cited the importance of the ‘pipeline’ from education to workforce and their desire to boost the talent pool available to them in the future,” CECP said in the report, released last fall.
The information technology sector contributed the most to K-12 education when giving was broken down by industry, with the energy sector giving the most to higher education.
The sense that helping educate the next generation is good business as well as good corporate citizenship seems to be informing the philanthropic decisions of New England companies, much as it is their national counterparts.
At Boston-based Fidelity Investments, whose Smithfield campus makes it the 8th-largest employer in Rhode Island, there’s been a conscious decision to focus on education, particularly in employee volunteer work.
“We are doing a lot more work in education these days and reformulating our charitable portfolio to focus on it,” said John Muggeridge, vice president of public affairs at Fidelity.
Over the last several years, Fidelity has formed partnerships with two Rhode Island schools in particular, Samuel Slater Junior High School in Pawtucket and Roger Williams Middle School in Providence.
At the two schools, Fidelity employees have helped repair buildings, landscaped school grounds and erected bleachers while offering support in the classroom on subjects from science to social studies.
And because Fidelity workers can only spend so much time at the schools themselves, the firm has worked with educators and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America so students can visit the Smithfield campus, learn about finance and be exposed to a professional work environment. “In addition to the financial literacy work, we try to get them up here and try to get them exposed to careers so there is an aspirational benefit,” Muggeridge said. “A lot of it is getting employees engaged with students, coaching them on a budget and managing credit. We have also had students build solar cars, close the roads and have them race around campus.”
Unlike some companies that give cash to schools, all of Fidelity’s education contributions are in-kind through employee time, Muggerridge said.
One question about all the new education giving is whether it is coming at the expense of other causes, such as anti-hunger campaigns or health-related giving.
“You try to add things on as best you can so you are not taking anything away,” Muggeridge said. “In many cases what we are doing is aligning with some of the interests of the employees.”
For many companies, giving revolves entirely on leveraging the interests and charitable spirits of individual workers.
FM Global in Johnston offers a dollar-for-dollar match to employee charitable donations, said spokesman Steven Zenofsky.
Back at Toray, the $2 million pledge for the engineering school is the latest in a line of donations to URI, including $4.3 million for scholarships in the past 10 years. Toray employees also do work in local high schools, Schloesser said.
Considering how much the company benefits from URI students, Toray’s education contributions seem like a worthwhile investment. One annual collaboration has engineering school students come to Toray’s facility and review its operations, including its $100 million production lines, to see if they can find any areas for improvement.
“The students come in and see if there are any inefficiencies and sometimes when they come back to me and tell us what they found, we implement them,” Schloesser said. “And sometimes we hire them on the spot.” •

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