Taking Care of Business
The community- and firm-building benefits to pro bono work

by Layla Bellows

Summary: When companies are scrambling to find for-profit work, taking the time to find pro bono opportunities might seem counterintuitive, and indeed, the financial climate doesn’t mean it’s easy. Michael Pinto, AIA, design principal at Osborn architects in Glendale, Calif., says that it’s easier for his company to take on pro bono work when there’s plenty of fee-generating projects happening as well. However, the kinds of benefits firms report they get from donating their services occur in any economic climate and can extend beyond the economic crisis.

If your firm hasn’t already added a pro bono project or two to its portfolio, now might be the perfect time to experiment with it.

Expanded horizons
Although your company’s client roster might not be growing the way you’d like it to now, pro bono allows you to continue growing your network. The mechanics of a nonprofit simply lend themselves toward meeting some incredible—and incredibly powerful—members of your community. Corporate executives, civic leaders, and prominent business people tend to sit on a nonprofit’s board of directors, and just about any design proposal work has to be approved by this body.

“It’s a way to meet business and community leaders in a professional environment where they’re seeing the benefits of what you do,” David Gunderson, AIA, of Centerpoint Builders in Dallas says. And that’s a much stronger introduction than the cocktail parties and luncheons where a lot of networking takes place. Plus, when things right themselves, these new contacts could turn into new clients. Gunderson points out that if you make an impression on a board member, once that person has a paid opportunity available, your firm will be one that comes to mind.

James Abell, FAIA, an architect practicing in Tempe, Ariz., notes that in working in the pro bono format, you’re not just meeting potentially powerful people, you’re meeting a generally different kind of person than you might otherwise meet in the standard business setting.

“If you think about who in America is willing to pull off to the side of the road and donate their services or their time, that’s a different caliber of person than we normally meet in society,” he says. “So if you become one of those people who pulls off to the side of the road and donates, you’re going to hang out with a pretty special group of people.”

In other words, by donating your time, you’re elevating yourself within the overall decision-making network. And Abell would know: He attributes no small portion of his current level of success, including his status as a Fellow of the Institute, to the pro bono work he has done, beginning with being part of a design charrette on homelessness in the late ’80s. Today he maintains his involvement through both the AIA’s R/UDATs and Public Architecture’s 1% program.

Particularly for younger, smaller firms, pro bono work also offers a way to increase their design portfolio. NC-office in Miami, for instance, is in the midst of a project for the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana, the Memorial for the Cuban Balseros lost at sea.

“It would be great if we could keep on doing these public projects; we would love to be doing mostly public projects,” Nik Nedev, a member of the four-architect firm, says. While still grappling with some of the Balseros memorial’s logistics, the members of NC-office have put together a proposal to create a public park on an underused parcel of land within the city.

Go Team!
Even the people who still have work are planning their budgets and otherwise living as though they didn’t, which is leaving many workplaces with a generally down environment. In nearly all cases, those firms that place an emphasis on engaging with the community through service work say it just creates a better atmosphere within the office.

For instance, members of HOK’s St. Louis office have spent the past several years helping an animal rescue group get the shelter Animal House off the ground. It’s one of many service projects that JoAnn Brookes, AIA, a project architect at HOK, says bring some fun into the office.

“You know, it kind of gets us out of that whole large-scale corporate architecture mindset and lets us work on some smaller things that are more approachable,” she says, “things that we can go to and see and touch.”

Tami Paulsen, the director of business for Paulsen Architects in Mankato, Minn., says the major benefit she’s seen from their pro bono work—above and beyond the networking and fee-generating work it’s led to—is the positive affect it has on Paulsen’s staff.

“It creates a different sense of culture or a different mentality,” she says. “People really want to be engaged and feel a part of something.” She says that the pro bono projects help keep positive energy buzzing around the office and that it pays off in many ways. “Prospective clients see that too. They get that energy and see that feeling of commitment.”

Pinto says pro bono projects have been essential for Osborn’s general sense of well-being. The firm does a lot of work on schools, which can be a five-year project, but most pro bono projects simply don’t take that kind of time because there are smaller constituencies to work with. “Just having those things that happen on a quicker pace is such a needed thing in an office where you’re dealing with public regulations a lot.”

The bigger thing Pinto says Osborn’s commitment to pro bono work has done is attract new talent to the company: “We just hired a project architect with considerable experience who came here because of our reputation for community engagement. She said: ‘I needed something else; I needed to come to a place where we were able to talk about the public good.’”

And, in days when nobody knows what is going to happen next when it comes to their firm’s work, being able to attract and keep top talent is a boon for current and potential clients as well.