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A VistaPrint employee takes a month’s leave to volunteer in the developing world
By Rebecca Trela
Above: Nancy Brown, center, with new Haitian friends: Junior, Wilson, Gogo and Caleb. Brown took advantage of a new month-off program from her employer, VistaPrint, to volunteer building schools and hospitals in Haiti.
Right: A house the Partners for Haiti team worked on. Most Haitians live in cement or concrete homes with tin roofs and open windows
Last winter, Nancy Brown’s teenagers, 15 and 17, begged her to go with them to a Caribbean island, “but I had all these lame excuses,” she says. Her children are part of a church youth group and instead of pleading for a vacation, they were ready to roll up their sleeves and volunteer in a developing nation. Although Nancy was a leader for the group, “I just couldn’t get the time off work to go,” says the quality assurance manager, who works on VistaPrint’s website and is based in Lexington, Mass.
At the printing company’s holiday party in January, Brown says, her last excuse was wiped away. “Our CEO, Robert King, stands up and announces a new benefit for employees,” she says. Any employee who’s been with VistaPrint for at least five years is entitled to a VistaBreak, a continuous paid month off work, including benefits. “Okay! I knew I had to go on the trip then,” she laughs.
While many people would use the time off to relax or take a leisure trip, Brown shared her good fortune and break on a service trip to Haiti. The 17 teenagers and six adults in the group worked with charity organization Partners for Haiti. They taught at a Bible study group for children in Cité Soleil, an area of the capital, Port-au-Prince. It’s considered one of the world’s most dangerous, dirtiest slums. The group also helped build hospitals, schools and an orphanage in the country—most of the time, without running water or electricity.
“It was an awesome, incredible trip,” she says. “I wouldn’t have been able to take it without this program. We were gone for 16 days and then I got a few days to recover. Usually, I’m sitting at a desk, and manual labor is very different!”
The VistaBreak program is in addition to traditional paid time off and sick leave, and may only be taken once every five years. Since January, everyone eligible has taken the break or made plans to. The company declined to report how many people have gone or where, but several VistaPrint employees took philanthropic vacations prior to the program’s introduction. One woman helped rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and another took four weeks’ unpaid leave to do charity work in Rwanda. Brown, who has been with VistaPrint for six and a half years, typically takes family vacations camping or to see baseball games. “This trip was really a great experience, a lot of fun and hard work,” she says.
“Haiti is much different than I expected,” she continues. “It’s about 100 degrees there all the time, and it’s humid. You’re hit with it right when you come out of the airport. Most people say, ‘Oh, Haitians are used to it.’ No, they’re not! The heat takes a lot of your energy.”
Although sometimes people assume charity recipients aren’t grateful or are humiliated by help, Brown says, the Haitians she worked with were incredibly grateful and not skeptical or cynical of the foreigners’ aid. “There are things there that you can’t imagine,” she says. “For example, most people can’t afford to shop at a grocery store, and they buy raw meat in the street, if they can afford it. Sometimes they cook it there, over an open flame. In Port-au-Prince, the populous capital, there’s one doctor for every 10,000 people—in the country, the ratio is higher.”
Before she left, Brown posted information about her trip on VistaPrint’s intranet, and several of her coworkers supported her trip with donations. “One of my coworkers, Ann Marie, sponsored a child at just the right time. The child’s family had just spent their $25 to pay for tuition, because they know how important education is, and were left without money for food. That was so exciting for them, and for me, when it worked out.”
Brown has traveled around the United States, to Europe and to Barbados, but had never been anywhere like Haiti before. “It’s not like you’re going to the pool or the beach, or playing tennis or golf,” she says. “We spent one day at the beach—it was a two and a half hour drive over rocky, bumpy roads to get there.” The group was taking children to the beach, many of whom had never seen the ocean, despite living on an island.
All the work was really rewarding, though, Brown says. “We mixed cement by hand and carried it in pails. It was good to see our teams working hard, and everyone was so nice and so thankful. It was way better than floating on a lazy inner tube.” Originally, she didn’t plan to return to Haiti, but is now thinking of another trip next year.
“One of my coworkers took my photo album home to show his three daughters,” she says. “They told him, ‘Wow, Daddy, I don’t think I’d want to live in a place like that!’” That was part of the point of her trip, Brown says. “We don’t see that here in America, and we don’t realize how little people really have. It was a great trip to take with my kids, and it was really an eye-opener for them. It’s changed their perspective on how they can help and how they can be of service to other people right here at home, too.”