“The pro bono work for NGOs at Bain, my consulting work for The Bridgespan Group, and my role as a Program Officer at The Goldman Sachs Foundation was much more meaningful and gave me greater satisfaction.” – how meaningful work matters for people with all types of skills.

Renée Berman, Vice President, Community Invest-ment, Credit Suisse First Boston, Hong Kong, P. R. China

“The Credit Suisse Group Foundation was endowed by the Credit Suisse Group (CSG), one of the largest Swiss finan-cial services companies, with a USD 10 million donation after the tsunami to assist in the long-term development of the region. These funds were supplemented by an ad-ditional contribution of USD 300,000 from employees. The CSG Foundation will be used to support education and microfinance initiatives in the areas affected by the tsu-nami and for future disaster relief activities.” – Renée Berman explained when we met her in the Credit Suisse offices in Hong Kong.

As Renée told us, this is only a small part of the overall engagement of the Credit Suisse Group in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but an area where the skills of the employees can be leveraged very well to achieve positive impact. Renée, a former management consultant, is responsible for coordinating the philanthro-pic activities of Credit Suisse in Asia Pacific, which in-cludes tasks such as identifying and recommending pro-jects for funding to the Board of Trustees, coordinating the distribution of the money across Asia Pacific and monitoring the projects where investments have been made. She enjoys this work at the crossroads of invest-ment banking and doing social good; that’s exactly where she can use her excellent investment and consulting skills and at the same time make a difference to the lives of many people.

Enjoy reading some of Renée’s thoughts in the selected quotations below and you may be able to read more about her activities in our book “MyImpact”.

Renée’s selected quotations:
“While at Bain & Company, I was assigned to a variety of classic business consulting projects. For example, I led a cross functional team for a year at a boxboard manufac-turer to help rationalize their costs. At the end of the day, it was not meaningful to me if they reduced their costs by $3M or $3.5M. The pro bono work for NGOs at Bain, my consulting work for The Bridgespan Group, and my role as a Program Officer at The Goldman Sachs Foun-dation was much more meaningful and gave me greater satisfaction.”

“Before I came to Hong Kong, I designed a program for Social Entrepreneurs in India. It was a great experience; three entrepreneurs wanted to establish this program and with my skills and experience, I was able to help them take the first step.”

“Currently, I am managing Credit Suisse First Boston’s an-nual philanthropic activity in Asia Pacific, which amounts to USD 500,000. In addition, after the tsunami, the Group Executive Board allocated USD 10 million to a fund for disaster relief to focus on supporting long term projects in education and microfinance in the tsunami affected re-gion. It is my main challenge to allocate these funds into projects where they have the greatest impact.”

Some background on Renee Berman:
Renée received her undergraduate degree from The Whar-ton School at the University of Pennsylvania and her MBA from the University of Chicago. After business school, Renée worked as a strategy consultant for Bain & Company in Chicago. While at Bain, she parti-cipated in a number of pro bono pro-jects and eventually transferred to The Bridgespan Group, a Bain affiliate in Boston, which specializes in providing strategic consulting advice to non-profit organisations. Her next step was New York, where she worked as a Program Officer at The Goldman Sachs Foundation, overseeing investments in Social Entrepre-neurship and Business Education. Renée initially started working with the CSFB Foundation as a consultant and was asked to join the firm to manage the philanthropic activities in Asia when Credit Suisse allocated the funds for tsunami relief in January 2005.

Some background on Credit-Suisse First Boston (CSFB):
Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) is a leading global in-vestment bank serving institutional, corporate, govern-ment and high-net-worth clients. It is a leader across the spectrum of investment banking, capital markets and financial services, ranking in the top tier in virtually all major business segments.

CSFB is part of the Credit Suisse Group (CSG), a world-leading financial services company, advising clients in all aspects of finance, around the world.

Credit Suisse Group engages in a dialog with representa-tives of society and politics. It is involved with key busi-ness organizations and publishes its own contributions to the public debate. In addition, Credit Suisse Group sup-ports numerous charitable humanitarian, social and cultu-ral organizations and institutions.

In 1997, Credit Suisse Group became the first bank in the world to implement an environmental management system which is certified according to ISO 14001. The Group has thus laid the foundations to enable it to apply its know-ledge to a variety of specialist areas and to continue to develop its environmental management system on an on-going basis.

If you would like to engage with the work of Renée Berman or get to know more about Credit Suisse please visit www.credit-suisse.com,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.