Zeynep Uluer

Zeynep Uluer forges strong partnerships between businesses and citizen organizations, helping corporate volunteers leverage their professional skills to address the needs of poor communities across Turkey.

Through the corporate volunteer effort she began in 2000, Zeynep establishes a new spirit of partnership between the business and social sectors and makes the most of each sector’s power to solve social problems. Zeynep and her team recruit and match corporate volunteers with civil society organizations and local schools. She meticulously arranges orientation and feedback processes to create a spirit of friendly cooperation and mutually beneficial exchange. Volunteers find applications for their professional skills in the citizen sector and begin to see social initiatives in a new and positive light. For their part, citizen organizations get specialized assistance such as legal aid or Web design from a trained and eager volunteer.
Establishing such relationships requires a fundamental shift in how the business and social sectors work together to solve social problems. Knowing that this shift could take an overwhelming amount of time, Zeynep works tirelessly to refine and adapt her programs for maximum speedy impact. She reaches out to new audiences, enlists new business and organizational partners, and captures lessons learned through careful feedback and monitoring.

Solving Turkey’s vast and complex social challenges will require resources, innovation, and years of effort from all sectors of society. Yet so far, the burden for addressing social ills has fallen only on the state and a few religious charities. The citizen sector is full of potential, but remains underutilized and underdeveloped. Following a coup in 1980, the Turkish military dissolved all citizen initiatives, and the government subjected them to intense scrutiny for decades after. Only recently—since the 1999 Izmit earthquake—have citizen groups begun to rebound. Even so, many organizations remain strapped for resources and are unable to grow due to a tough regulatory environment.

The business sector could play an important role in addressing social problems by lending critical resources to citizen-led efforts. Many professionals in the corporate world welcome the chance to apply themselves to a broader vision than simply augmenting the corporation’s bottom line. Yet few structured opportunities for such a contribution exist. No existing efforts make use of the skills and training of Turkish professionals to produce concrete results like the resolution of a legal matter, a new Website for an organization, or a sustained effort to encourage literacy among children in neighborhood schools. Instead, such opportunities typically cast volunteer professionals as unskilled temporary laborers rather than important long-term contributors. These experiences generally reinforces volunteers’ understanding of the citizen sector as inefficient and unworthy of their time. Without consideration and care in matching the volunteer with citizen sector need, volunteer efforts are wasted.

Having worked both for private businesses and citizen organizations, Zeynep knows that each side lacks an understanding of the practices and aims of the other. To solve this problem, she has designed a corporate volunteerism program that enables a spirit of partnership and matches volunteer skill with real need.

To arrange the corporate side of the exchange, Zeynep recruits a senior contact in each business who is willing to oversee the effort and advocate to company executives. After initial parameters are set, they invite an ambassador from among the junior staff to do the legwork, organizing meetings and workshops, recruiting volunteers, and generally keeping an eye on the satisfaction levels of the corporate volunteers. For the ambassador, the opportunity is a chance to demonstrate initiative and take ownership over a productive venture.

Zeynep does not try to manage all aspects of the program, since companies have strong cultures of their own and resist being molded from outside. Instead she begins by offering standard workshops and orientations for new volunteers. These informal sessions cover the basics, explaining the structure and mission of the citizen sector, detailing what volunteers should expect from their experience, and describing the volunteer opportunities that are available. These orientation sessions are designed to mitigate the arrogant attitude of some corporate volunteers and prepare them to weather the frustrations they may experience as part of their work. Zeynep works with each site ambassador to maintain a tight structure, holding volunteers and their hosting organizations accountable to their commitments. Volunteers clock their hours just as they would their hours at work; they also sign contracts prior to participating. Monthly check-ins with the volunteers and the hosting organization keep things running smoothly and help to flag any problems.

Forty businesses currently partner with Zeynep’s program, including large international firms such as JP Morgan, IBM, and Borson. Some companies use their original partnership as a stepping stone to bigger and better investments in social good, as a result of the initiative of the ambassador or the leadership of spirited volunteers. For example, a textile company started partnership with a local school through Zeynep in which sixteen volunteers traveled read to children for one to two hours per week. As they interacted with the children and saw their desperate need for other resources, the volunteers resolved to help further, and set up donation boxes in the office for clothes and school supplies. The effort offered an opportunity for non-volunteers to contribute, deepened the identity of the volunteer group, and provided considerable benefit to the school. The school praised the company and its volunteers to journalists, whose articles inspired other companies to contact Zeynep and start their own partnerships.

On the citizen-sector side, Zeynep performs a similar intermediary role. She offers orientations to hosting citizen groups and helps them develop a plan for volunteer management. She warns them that the volunteers may not approach the situation with the correct attitude at first, and prepares her hosts to educate volunteers, helping them to adjust their approach and maximize their impact. In addition to working with a network of public schools, Zeynep has selected ten committed and responsible citizen groups to collaborate with her business partners.

To coordinate the volunteer matching effort, Zeynep formed Corporate Volunteer Association, a group primarily supported by membership fees. While most of her activities are in Istanbul, she has begun to expand to other areas, using the existing networks and franchises of some member companies and bringing on new members. On the corporate side, she hopes to eventually enlist 250 companies. On the citizen sector side, she is hopes for significant expansion as well, and she helps to push for improvements in the regulatory and legal environment to allow more citizen organizations to grow and ready themselves to partner with businesses.

Zeynep recognizes that if the movement takes off the way she intends, her association may become unnecessary in five or ten years as corporations and citizen groups become so closely intertwined that they are able to coordinate without the need for an intermediary. While this might put her organization out of business, it would also signal the success of her greatest goal: to make volunteerism an integral part of corporate and public life.

Born to Turkish parents living abroad, Zeynep spent much of her early life in Buffalo, New York, where her father had an obstetrics practice. With the exception of periodic visits back home and three years spent in Istanbul during elementary school, Zeynep and her brother grew up in the United States. Early experiences in Buffalo taught the children important lessons in tolerance and diversity. As Muslim students at a Jesuit day school and ethnic Turks living among Americans, they found themselves navigating complicated cultural tensions. From these experiences, Zeynep learned to move fluidly between groups and to cross through traditional barriers between people with ease.

During high school, Zeynep found her first volunteer experience so rewarding that she formed an organizing committee to push for similar experiences among her peers, matching classmates with host organizations across Buffalo. She attended university in Istanbul and then returned to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in international relations. After finishing a thesis on the political participation of women in Turkey, she returned to Istanbul in the early nineties, taking a marketing job with Citibank Turkey in 1995.

During her work with Citibank, Zeynep observed that several multinationals offered corporate volunteering opportunities in Turkey, but she was disappointed to find them limited in scope and vision. She began to consider ways of adapting the volunteer models of American corporations to her country. In 1997, she received a Citibank Foundation grant to start a volunteer program for staff at the Istanbul branch. She brought on board three education-focused citizen groups as partners and began matching corporate volunteers with public schools. These early years helped her to see successful volunteer efforts from a corporate perspective.

Following the 1999 earthquake, Zeynep gathered a group of 300 colleagues to participate in volunteer efforts in the affected region of Izmit. She noticed that the crisis had brought corporate sponsorship of relief efforts to new levels. Sensing that the moment was right to engage business widely in solving social problems, Zeynep left her job at Citibank, and in 2001 began the work that has grown into the Corporate Volunteer Association.