Born of a strong legacy and honed by field experience, Work at Heart is VBM’s new identity for corporate volunteering. It responds to today’s social realities with a clear, inclusive, and measurable framework that turns business expertise into sustained capacity for organizations.
On a weekday morning in Montréal. In a café on a lively corner, one conversation turns on tight budgets and waitlists; two tables over, it’s about impact, leadership, and a desire to do things differently. These conversations don’t always intersect. Between the community sector and the business world, there is often a distance, different paces, languages, constraints. Work at Heart was born in that space: a patient, concrete, human bridge. A framework that turns good will into something solid that lasts.
Here’s where we come from, and why this new chapter arrives at the right time.
A deliberate trajectory
- 2006: Creation of Bénévoles d'affaires, a founding organization launched by Ugo Dionne and Marie-Pierre Dufort, two entrepreneurs with a strong community spirit. They give more than 15 years on a voluntary baisis and managed to lay the groundwork for this bold movement and enabled hundreds of matches in Montréal.
- 2019: Merger with VBM. To ensure the movement’s longevity, the offering was integrated into the organization’s mission and gradually took its place.
- 2022–2024: A period called Skills-Based Volunteering, with the addition of a dedicated web module while also coordinating corporate group matches. A rich development phase: we tested, refined, and documented.
- 2025: Birth of the Work at Heart concept—VBM’s corporate volunteering program. Scope now covers corporate group volunteering, as well as employer-supported skills-based and governance volunteering.
At VBM, skills-based volunteering evolved in parallel with corporate volunteering and is now an integral part of our overall approach to volunteering—while remaining accessible within a corporate-volunteering context. More specifically, we now consider that volunteer positions carry the “skills/specialized” specificity. Depending on their preferences and potential, a person may choose either regular, on-the-ground volunteering or to share a particular expertise or experience. Every contribution matters.
VBM’s corporate volunteering now includes three complementary modalities:
- Corporate group volunteering;
- Employer-supported skills-based volunteering;
- Employer-supported governance volunteering.
What experience has taught us
Drawing on years of experience and observation since Corporate Volunteers merged into VBM (2019), our teams have found that the community sector and the business world are often two solitudes when it comes to social engagement.
The Work at Heart concept offers better alignment through guidance. For the encounter to be pleasant, respectful, and genuinely impactful, preparation of all parties is essential: clarifying expectations, roles, and limits; building awareness of each other’s realities; and providing a shared minimal toolkit. Good will alone is not enough.
Why “now”? A social context calling for better
Community organizations face amplified challenges:
- Increased pressure on services (cost of living, isolation, mental health, aging, food needs).
- More professional practices, but scarce resources and time; the need for simple, reusable tools.
- Search for meaning within companies: teams want to learn through impact, not optics.
- EDI expectations: acting with equity, inclusive language, and attention to power dynamics.
In corporate volunteering, one simple principle guides us: We start from the needs expressed by organizations, while listening to companies’ objectives. We support everyone toward a positive experience for all.
What Work at Heart changes (versus previous phases)
- Clear positioning: an engagement framework anchored in the organization’s mission.
- Clear eligibility criteria: a specific, realistic, and relevant need for the organization.
- Explicit roles: organization, company, volunteer—everyone knows what to do, when, and why.
- Simple impact measurement: results delivered, knowledge transfer, satisfaction, and follow-ups.
- Active inclusion: accessible mandates, plain language, attention to barriers (time, culture, resources).
- Company membership in VBM: companies seeking VBM’s matching support must henceforth be members, committing to know and respect VBM’s values and mission, just like community organizations that participate in VBM’s matching services.
- Pre-engagement learning pathway: all parties complete a prior pathway (framework, expectations, EDI, roles) prepared by VBM to better ready the meeting of the two worlds: the community sector and the business world.
- Shared appreciation & impact review: after the experience, parties share with VBM a review covering results, learnings, next steps, and paths to sustain changes.
In short: Work at Heart is intended as a brand with deep meaning: it brings people together, humanizes, and stamps encounters between organizations and the business community with a reassuring seal.
Work at Heart turns good will into value created for the community.
Call to action
- Clear positioning: an engagement framework anchored in the organization’s mission.
- Clear eligibility criteria: a specific, realistic, and relevant need for the organization.
With Work at Heart and the intentional integration of skills-based volunteering across VBM’s overall approach, we aim to increase and diversify the pool of volunteers and strengthen the support offered to organizations—for durable, concrete, and measurable effects across the community.
