The Jingle of Corporate Donations

It's the holiday season and with that comes the age old tradition of gift-giving. It seems appropriate, then, to recognize some of the giving high-tech companies have been engaging in recently.

AMD's CEO Dr. Hector Ruiz met this month with some top-ranking Chinese officials in China. Their discussions centered around China's fast-growing technology industry and AMD's ability to play a role in promoting that country's IT development and expertise through the use of AMD's leading technologies. During his visit, Ruiz noted that the chip maker donated $120,000 (U.S.) to help ensure that all primary, secondary and university students in China have the opportunity to receive a quality education.

Another chip maker, Motorola, is also involved in assisting the Chinese build their economy. Since 1994, Motorola (China) Electronics Ltd. has donated to Project Hope, a social welfare program aimed particularly at educating China's poorest children. Through Motorola's contributions, Project Hope has improved conditions for those students, through endeavors such as providing financial aid to more than 9,000 children to help them complete their schooling and building 40 primary schools in 25 provinces and establishing six sample Web schools, which are multimedia classrooms designed to synchronize teaching with model schools in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.

Also from the chip side of things, Intel this fall announced it was expanding the company's assistance to the Arab world through its Innovation in Education program. It's a multimillion-dollar effort to collaborate with educators in communities around the world to improve the quality of mathematics, science and engineering education. Two interesting parts of the program include "Teach to the Future" and "Computer Clubhouse."

Teach to the Future (free to participants) helps teachers integrate technology effectively into their classroom instruction to enhance student learning. To date, it has trained more than 1.3 million teachers in more than 30 countries worldwide. The Intel Computer Clubhouse is an after-school program that provides youth ages 10 to 18 access to high-tech equipment, professional software and adult mentors. The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network currently includes more than 65 Clubhouse in the United States and 10 other countries.Closer to home, IBM last month donated 93 kid-friendly computers to classrooms of at-risk preschoolers in North Carolina. The state program, dubbed "More At Four," distributes equipment to classrooms based on need. IBM will also provide training for all lead teachers who receive computers in their classroom. Combined with last year's donation of more than 200 computers, IBM has donated more than $750,000 in equipment and training to More at Four since its inception in 2001.

At a time when the term Big Business has become synonymous with Big Bad Wolf, it is nice to hear about corporate giving that, seemingly, has not strings attached. If the ulterior motive of these companies is to give themselves a better, more technically trained pool of workers from which to choose, I'd say that's a gift we can all enjoy.

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