In collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, State Farm’s Partners for Child Passenger Safety program promotes the on-road safety of children.

Before Valerie Caraballo-Perez even puts her car in drive, she looks back to make sure her 5-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter are properly buckled up. As a pediatric emergency nurse and a crash investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, it’s second nature for her.

“It’s hard to separate my roles when it comes to my children,” she says. “From a nursing and crash-investigator standpoint, I know of too many preventable child-occupant injuries and deaths. As a parent, my children’s safety is my utmost priority. So I make sure to restrain my children.”

She has good reason to do so. She remembers one patient in particular, a seven-year-old who was injured while sitting in the front seat of the car with the shoulder belt under her arm. The child suffered injuries to the face, lungs, ribs, and femur so severe that she required a chest tube and had to be intubated. The girl’s own mother was driving the car, and what sticks out in Caraballo-Perez’s mind is how sure the mom had been that her daughter would be safe sitting in the front seat right beside her.

That’s why, as a mother and as a nurse, she appreciates an innovative program sponsored by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and auto insurer State Farm. The Partners for Child Passenger Safety program is a research collaboration that promotes the safety of children traveling in motor vehicles. It’s through PCPS that families and healthcare professionals can learn that the safest place for kids in a car is the back seat, not the front.

The partnership between State Farm and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is just one of a growing number of initiatives used by businesses to look after the health of their employees and the community at large. MIND AND BODY In April, Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) introduced a bipartisan bill giving employers incentives to improve the health of their employees. According to Harking and Cornyn, the Workforce Health Improvement Program (WHIP) Act would make it easier for employers to offer wellness benefits like fitness-center memberships—thereby encouraging workers to live healthier lifestyles. Currently, if employers offer wellness benefits like gym memberships, employees have to include those as taxable income. The WHIP Act would exclude the wellness benefit from being considered as such, while also allowing employers to deduct the cost of providing or subsidizing fitness-center benefits for all employees. The Ford Motor Company is just one example of a large employer offering a comprehensive wellness program, providing free on-site fitness centers for employees at many Ford locations. Workers have access to weight-stacked strength equipment and dumbbells, treadmills, steppers, ellipticals, bikes, and rowers. Additionally, about half of the centers offer exercise classes such as aerobics and yoga. The automaker recently reported spending more on health care than it does on steel, and their programs reflect a blend of traditional and not-so-traditional benefits. Aside from the fitness centers, Ford subsidizes a plan called “Safe-At-Home.” When employees’ children are too sick to attend school or day care, when back-up care falls through, or when business-related emergencies arise, Ford reimburses parents up to 80 percent of the cost of a trained caregiver. That fits into the ever-expanding definition of nontraditional benefits as incentives for helping employees balance their life at work and at home. At McDonald’s, eligible employees can take an eight-week sabbatical for every 10 years of continuous full-time service they spend with the company; at State Farm, employees at the company’s headquarters and some other locations have access to health-club discounts, ergonomics training, flu vaccinations, and Pilates classes.

Although a survey by the American Animal Hospital Association shows that most pet owners consider pet insurance more of a luxury than a necessity, it’s an issue that hits close to home considering that some 69 million Americans own a pet. The Home Depot actually offers veterinary pet insurance as one of its group benefits, which Vice President of Benefits Ileana Connally says is available to all of its over 325,00 full- and part-time associates. It’s available for selected household pets and covers a wide range of medical conditions related to accidental injury, poisoning, and illness—including cancer. On the more human side of the equation, the company offers time off for bereavement, adoption assistance, and a special program for employees’ special kids. Via MetDESK, a division of insurance company MetLife, the Home Depot helps families secure lifetime care and quality of life for children or other dependents with special needs.

Dipping into unusual programs like these can mean strengthening a company’s bottom line, since cutting down on absenteeism and therefore increasing productivity means greater retention of human capital. In a poll by the Work & Family Connection website, two-thirds of respondents said they were too tired to concentrate at work because of work-life conflicts. The Employee Benefit Research Institute reports that some economists believe that there’s a link between the health of workers and the health of the broader society; they argue that the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) grows when individual firms take action to create more productive workers.

HEART AND SOUL

Beyond their own offices, corporations are reaching out into the community with an eye on health. Like State Farm, Ford sponsors a car-safety initiative with national impact. Corazón de Mi Vida, a national bilingual child-passenger safety-awareness campaign, is meant to inform the Spanish-speaking community about the importance of car seats and seat belts in saving children’s lives.

Dr. Flaura Winston, principal investigator on the PCPS study at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, stresses the importance of communication when reaching out to Spanish-speaking communities. “There are few child-passenger-safety materials available for Spanish-speaking drivers,” says the pediatrician and bioengineer. “Child-passenger safety can be very complex, and we want to be sure that the messages and instruction are clear—in the driver’s native tongue. We don’t want to see well-meaning, loving parents make deadly mistakes because of language barriers.”

Participants in Ford’s Corazón de Mi Vida program, with Raquel Egusquiza (fourth from left), director of Ford’s National Programs and International Strategy. A child is correctly secured in his carseat in a Ford Corazón de Mi Vida demonstration.

To that end, State Farm and the Children’s Hospital have made sure that their Interactive Child Passenger Safety website (www.chop.edu/carseat) is available in Spanish as well as English. Beyond the intricacies of language lie the intricacies of culture, which is why some corporations head straight to the source. Kraft Food’s Salsa, Sabor y Salud program, developed in conjunction with the National Latino Children’s Institute, is an eight-session program helping Hispanic families with children 12 and under to make healthy eating choices and to incorporate activity into their day-to-day lives. The program partners up with a number of children’s centers in the Latino community, including Para los Niños in Los Angeles, Casa Central in Chicago, and La Casa de Don Pedro in New Jersey.

“Through our work in the community, we know that community-based partners are important in reaching Latinos,” says Patricia L. Garza, associate director of community involvement with Kraft Foods. “It is our experience that outreach is easier when made through an organization that is already engaged with the family, that already is a trusted source for the family.”

Automaker General Motors lends a hand to the community in another tangible way. For every visitor who requested a free “People First” wristband via its Saturn.com website in March, the brand made a donation to support marrow-donor registrations. More than 85,000 Americans are waiting for a life-saving organ transplant, and the Saturn National Donor Day, taking place every Feb. 14, is the largest single-day event in the nation to encourage blood, organ, and tissue donation. Since 1998, Donor Day events have collected over 50,000 units of blood and registered 10,000 potential marrow donors.

According to a survey conducted by the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Center for Corporate Citizenship, a majority of businesses, regardless of their size, provide cash, volunteer time, or donate goods and services to local communities. In fact, 83 percent of executives surveyed said that good corporate citizenship helps the bottom line.

Nurse and researcher Caraballo-Perez, for one, sees a priceless result from the pairing up of State Farm and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She says that since the Partners for Child Passenger Safety program got started, “I’ve seen a heightened awareness of the issue. But more importantly, health-care professionals and parents are now better armed with knowledge and skills to keep our children safer.”

That’s part of the reason that businesses reach out to both their own workers and the communities around them—it provides benefits that keep on giving.