29 November 2011 -  Vienna, Austria - DOT Vice President, Jane Jamieson, was a featured plenary speaker at the Global Corporate Volunteering Conference held in Vienna this week. The conference, organized annually by leading consultancy corporAID, brings together several hundred leading experts and European and multinational corporations involved in the growing field of corporate responsibility and social enterprise.

Jane's keynote presentation set the scene for a day of workshops and expert panels. She spoke on the increasingly important relationship between business and development and she emphasized how global partnerships between corporations and social enterprises are critical to the realization of effective and sustainable value to the community, the country and the corporation. She stressed that DOT has been a champion of this model of "Smart CSR".

She went on to describe critical success factors for effective partnering and she illustrated several cases of the partnership model in action. Jane described the DOT ten-year relationship with Cisco and how it has brought education and economic innovation to Mississippi and Louisiana, China, Mexico and Lebanon. She closed with a focus on corporate volunteering and the DOT-IBM partnership to deliver IBM's Corporate Service Corps and Executive Service Corps programs in Turkey, Egypt, China, Kenya, Tanzania, Mexico and the UAE.

The blend of practical programming, on the ground experience and thoughtful lessons learned was well received by the delegates.