The primary focus of our corporate citizenship activities is on developing initiatives to address specific societal issues, such as the environment, community economic development, education, health, literacy, language and culture. We employ IBM's most valuable resources, our technology and talent, in order to create innovative programs in these areas to assist communities around the world.

For example, our Corporate Service Corps program annually deploys teams of selected high potential employees to emerging regions to work with government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations on critical local projects. Teams have completed projects in Ghana, Romania, Tanzania, the Philippines and Vietnam around water quality, disaster preparedness and project management.

Our World Community Grid initiative utilizes grid computing technology to harness the tremendous power of idle computers to perform specific computations related to critical research around complex biological, environmental and health-related issues. The current projects include Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Clean Energy, and Nutritious Rice for the World, FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, AfricanClimate@Home, and a genomics initiative and research on Dengue Fever.

Another example of our citizenship activities is our employee volunteer initiative, entitled On Demand Community. Since its inception in 2003, over 130,000 employees and retirees have registered and performed over 8 million hours of volunteer service around the world. This program equips our employee and retiree volunteers with a distinct set of on demand tools based on the successful technology solutions created exclusively by IBM for schools and community agencies. These Web-based tools provide them with a myriad choice of meaningful volunteer opportunities, resources and specific activities designed to help make them more effective volunteers and to offer valuable assistance to schools and not-for-profit organizations.

To learn more about our work in the context of IBM's broader corporate responsibility efforts, please visit Innovations in Corporate Responsibility.