Volunteers help overseas firms

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32439, 28 October 1970, Page 7

Volunteers help overseas firms

Since it began in 1965, the International Executive Service Corps, a private, non-profit organisation with headquarters in New York, has sent out more than 2000 United States executives—averaging 30 years experience—to help businessmen in developing countries solve their problems.

From time to time the question of including women executives in the programme was raised. Those who asked seemed to expect “no” for an answer.

•two more in 1969 and five iso far in 1970.

The nine have ranged in jage from the mid-40s to the 1 early 70s. AH have won high praise ifrom their overseas clients, j Louise E. Barthold of ! Cleveland Heights, Ohio, the I.E.S.C. pioneer Woman volunteer. says: “In a way I understand why so few women have had assignments abroad. Most assignments call for the kind of experience in executive and industry fields where men , still dominate in the United States but we women are i getting there.”

After all, in many of the countries I.E.S.C. serves the idea that “a woman’s place is in the home" is more deeply rooted than in the United States.

But the I.E.S.C. president, Mr Frank Pace, points out that “I.ES.C. executive volunteers are recruited for their professional background and personal quali-’ ties" and that “neither sex nor age is a primary criter-l ion."

IN BRAZIL i Miss Barthold spent three months in Brazil helping an educational organisation expand its programme of courses for adults in office skills and business subjects. She had retired from General Electric only a year before. The second 1968 volunteer was a vigorous great grandmother in her 70s—Veronica Edna Fonda, a retired veteran employee of the Brown Shoe Company in St Louis, Missouri.

So far, I.E.S.C. has assigned nine women volunteers to projects in nine countries around the world —Brazil. Chile, Costa Rica, Greece, Honduras, Iran, Korea, Panama, and Thailand. These are in addition to the projects on which women have served as professional members of hus-band-and-wife teams. TWo of the women executives went abroad in 1968,

A top-flight specialist at organising pattern and fitting operations and training machine operators, she was assigned-to a shoe manufacturing firm in Panama. Production workers there came to call her “Miss Edna.”

The Panama project also actively engaged two other I.E.S.C. volunteers, Mr and Mrs Francis Gilkerson, also of St Louis. The three helped put the new company’s production on an efficient basis, set up a production control system, established standards of quality, revised office procedures and helped locate

promising domestic markets, thus helping to reduce imports and conserve the country’s foreign exchange. TEST KITCHEN Lillian Ziegfeld of New York City a cookbook author, former supervisor of United Fruit Company’s test kitchen, associate food editor of “Better Living” magazine, and a professional home economist—went to Iran to help establish a test kitchen for a company producing vegetable oils and shortening. Puerto Rican-bom Mrs Margarita Alganarez, a volunteer with 20 years’ ex-

perience in women's undergarment manufacturing in the United States, went to Costa Rica in April, 1970, for a three-month assignment.

Hers was one of the few projects for which the client requested a volunteer competent in the local language. Mrs Alganarez, a specialist m shop management, was asked to strengthen the training programme for machine operators.

The photograph shows Mrs Fonda supervising workers at a shoe manufacturing company in Panama.