On Leave, With Love : Altruism: Some corporate employees are fulfilling long-held dreams of working for something they believe in--while pulling down their full professional salaries.

One image etched itself on Dan Minchen’s mind when he covered the brutal riot at Attica Correctional Facility 21 years ago.

The prison wall.

To come across that enormously high and long wall, with its fairy tale-like guard towers. . . .

As his voice trails off this hot afternoon, the 45-year-old public relations man is taken back to his radio reporting days at a small, scrappy Buffalo station. It is September, 1971, and he is encamped outside the walls of the prison, which has been overtaken by inmates.

“It’s powerful. It’s ominously powerful. It’s not a sight you forget, either,” Minchen says. “Of all the news items I covered, that one had that unusual power to it, that just didn’t go away.”

But he went away. A relief reporter came and covered the storming of the prison by state troopers, and Minchen moved on to other assignments.

The Attica uprising faded from the headlines and from Minchen’s consciousness. But its power and the image of the wall never left him. He got on with his career, moving around the Upstate radio market until he married a woman who said the transient life of a journalist wasn’t for her.

Minchen got a job editing a newsletter for Xerox Corp. And, eight years ago, he moved to the community service department, where he works with product managers to develop publicity campaigns for new products, mostly photocopiers.

It was this job in the corporate world that allowed Minchen inside the walls of Attica at last.

Minchen is a participant in Xerox’s “social responsibility program.” As such, he is on a paid leave of absence to give his time to an organization that works with prisoners at Attica and other New York prisons.

This community service leave is part of a corporate effort--offered at only a handful of companies--to give back something to communities while accommodating altruistic activities of their employees.

Workers are given time off to work full time at community service agencies approved by their employers. These employees, from all levels of the company, are paid their regular salaries and benefits and maintain their seniority, while using their expertise to help such groups as the homeless, the elderly and battered women.

“Xerox takes its role in the community very seriously and knows that it has an awful lot of employees who would like to give something back to their communities,” says corporate spokesman Judd B. Everhart.

Kathleen Ryan, a spokesman for IBM, which offers a similar program, adds, “People go out on these leaves and come back energized.”

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The group Dan Minchen worked with--Cephas Attica Inc.--was founded a year after the Attica riot. It dedicates itself to helping inmates deal with their problems and plan for life after release. The group also provides halfway houses, employment in Cephas businesses and group counseling.

“I felt they were very good at what they did, but not very good at telling people about what they do,” Minchen says.

Cephas relies on a network of 50 churches to provide volunteers and monetary support. Minchen’s first contact with Cephas was in a presentation at his church.

“They carried with them an actual cell,” Minchen recalls, sitting in his suburban Rochester home. “They invited me to go in and then they slammed the door on me.” And they wouldn’t let him out when he asked.

“Their whole notion was to create feeling for the prisoners,” he says. “I knew what they were doing because I’d been there.” But Minchen knew Cephas’ message was obscured by its manner of delivery.

With his public relations training, he picked apart Cephas’ only publicity material, an eight-page brochure on blue stock. The cover shows face-to-face profiles--a down-cast silhouette, presumably that of a prisoner, and a black-and-white photo of the full-bearded Cephas founder Harold Steele, wearing his trademark knit cap.

“To me, it was not engaging,” Minchen says. “It did not give the suburban church-goer permission to enter into that world.”

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When Minchen started his leave last January, he spent his first month soaking up the work and purpose of Cephas. He spent hours and hours in counseling sessions with inmates and watching Cephas volunteers. As a result, he came up with a six-point public relations strategy.

Then he got to work plying his Xerox contacts for money to carry out his plans. He asked company managers for whom he had designed campaigns to kick in $1,000 here and $1,000 there. He sought donations of graphic design services and got a cut rate on printing costs. He enlisted help of the company’s media production studio, which was looking for a video to make to showcase its talents. He won permission to shoot film inside the prison.

Minchen had the new, warmer-looking brochure printed during his last week of leave; he finished the final editing of a video documentary two hours before his leave ended.

“It’s good feeling for us to have products like this that show our program with depth and clarity,” says Dorothy Steele, widow of the Cephas founder.

In all, Minchen estimates his effort put $70,000 worth of public relations consulting and materials in the hands of Cephas.

“When you sit next to a person who is doing 30 years of life and you look at him and see he looks so much like you . . . it doesn’t turn you into a person who wants to abandon prisons. But it’s very important to be connected to people who are different,” he says.

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For years, Hortense Vasquez, who has worked for IBM for 22 years, had thought about taking a leave to help the community. But she always felt her work schedule couldn’t accommodate it.

Last year, though, her best friend died of cancer. And during the prolonged illness, Vasquez--a 41-year-old from the San Jose suburb of Morgan Hill, realized that this was the time to get moving on her own dreams.

Because of its relationship with the American Society of Aging’s Business Forum--which brings businesses together to discuss the ramifications of an aging population--IBM knew the society did not have money to fund a position directing the forum in San Francisco.

Vasquez, whose most recent IBM assignment was as a director of purchasing and distribution for the San Jose facility--slid into the job in August, 1991, and plans to remain until October. When she leaves, she says, the society hopes to get another volunteer executive.

Says Vasquez: “I tell you, I have more and more respect for the care-givers.” And seeing IBM’s support, which includes a stipend for her living expenses in San Francisco, her salary and additional financial support for the society, she also gained more respect for her employer. “This reinforces how good IBM is.”

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Xerox’s Everhart says most leave-takers have been active volunteers, whose time is limited by family and work commitments. The program allows them to volunteer without diminishing their paychecks and benefits.

“They get a much better chance to produce something rather than trying to fit in their volunteer hours with their work schedule,” Everhart says.

Although they are tempted to work full time for the needy, employees who take leaves almost inevitably come back to their companies.

Patrick Pudetti, 44, a materials and parts expediter for Xerox, is working as a benefits counselor and outreach organizer for the Veterans Outreach Center in Rochester. The center shares space with the Vietnam Veterans of America chapter that Pudetti has been involved with for more than a decade.

He’d be happy working full time for the center, he says, if it could afford a salary for him.

“I could be helping people. The thing you forget about is the money end of it. Who’s going to pay for the groceries? Who’s going to pay for the mortgage?”

Although grateful that their employers allow them to attempt to help others, some leave takers return to their jobs reluctantly.

Duane Hyatt, 54, took a six-month leave in 1988 to be an advocate for the women at Bethany House, a shelter operated by the Catholic Workers organization on Rochester’s northeast side.

“It’s much more gratifying because I’m working with human beings instead of machines,” says Hyatt, whose job at Xerox is to test copiers. As soon as three years passed, making him eligible to apply for leave again, he did. And he won a second leave, this time for nine months, ending in September.

House co-director Donna Eckert says of Hyatt’s first leave: “It was tremendous because he was able to do all of those things in finding housing--getting into the system, resolving problems, getting furniture moved to their apartment, even just transporting people back and forth.”

Women at the house are allowed a three-week stay, during which time they also are busy signing up for welfare, trying to get jobs, getting into rehabilitation programs or parole schedules.

“These women are coming into Bethany House, they’re in crisis. They’re trying to get themselves straightened out,” says Hyatt. “They can be intimidated by landlords, so he goes along on their inspections of apartments. He reviews the landlord-tenant agreements with them. After he finished his first leave, Bethany House residents were on their own.

“When he came back to me the second time and said he was considering applying for another leave, I said, ‘Well, we have the same issue we had the last time.’ It has been a real godsend to have him doing that.”

This time, however, Hyatt will spend his last three months of leave trying to line up replacement help before he returns to work. Like Dan Minchen, he plans to continue the relationship.

“It’s part of my life’s work,” says Hyatt. “If I accomplish nothing like this again, at least I know I’ve done something good.”