Firms widen horizons with overseas volunteering.

Corporate volunteer programs have long dispatched workers to local schools or even further, into challenged neighborhoods, for example. But some companies have begun sending some volunteer workers much further, as in overseas.

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Ernst & Young, for one, has such a program.

"It was an opportunity to work with a company in a different culture and country," said Kris Brettingen, a manager in the Los Angeles office of Ernst & Young.

Brettingen spent three months in Montevideo, Uruguay, last year. He was matched with a consulting firm there that needed help with its expansion program throughout South America.

The practice is gaining support among more companies, according to Elmira Bayrasli, director of the partnerships department at Endeavor, a New York-based non-profit that helped Ernst & Young with the program.

Endeavor is currently working with Ciseo Systems Inc. and Dell Inc. to develop a similar sabbatical program, Bayrasli said.

"Recently, we have found big corporations coming to us," Bayrasli said, "to engage their employees in a concrete way where they can apply their business skills in an environment that's creating more jobs and innovations."

Deborah Holmes, a director of corporate social responsibility at Ernst & Young, said the accounting and consulting firm believes strongly in the program.

"For our company to maximize our positive impacts on society, our volunteerism should be focused on the intersection of societal needs and the knowledge of our people."

She said she was impressed with Pfizer Inc.'s Global Health Fellows program, which pairs its employees with non-governmental organizations working to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other devastating diseases overseas.

Three years ago, Holmes and her team came up with the Corporate Social Responsibility Fellows program, which has sent its professionals to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay every year.

The program allows its fellows to take a break from their normal job responsibilities for three months to work on their overseas assignments, which are also designed to improve their operational effectiveness by working with others in a different culture.

Brettingen said he also appreciated that company benefits and salaries remain the same while the volunteers are gone.

"When we return home, we are back to work as normal," he said. "I'd love to do it again. It's a unique program that gives back to the communities."

By YOO MI CHIN Contributing Reporter