Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers Lauded with NPower Powerful Connections Corporate Leadership Award

On the evening of June 25, JPMorgan Chase's downtown Manhattan headquarters in New York City turned host to an all-star gathering of 300+ corporate IT leaders, many coming from across the country to attend.

The occasion was NPower's first annual Powerful Connections corporate partnership dinner, which this year honored the legendary John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, for his own personal and his company's social responsibility vision. Cisco has long provided free hardware and funding for NPower, its affiliates, and their nonprofit organizational clients across the U.S. -- a small example of the company's overall engagement and social responsibility leadership worldwide.

The evening's highlight was a twenty-minute, free-wheeling live interview between Brian Sullivan, Fox Business News anchor, and Mr. Chambers. The two talked at length about the critical importance of corporate social responsibility leadership, and how to integrate it with obligations to shareholders, employees and other key corporate stakeholders. Asked to summarize his own corporate social responsibility vision, Mr. Chambers noted repeatedly that "It's not just the right thing to do, it's good for business."

"It all goes back to your ability to visualize what's possible as a business," the honoree added, "have the courage to do something others have not done, set an audacious goal that most people think isn't obtainable, get really good people like Barbara Chang [NPower's CEO] to lead the organization to do it, and then get out of the way."

Frank Bisignano, Chief Administrative Officer of JPMorgan Chase and Vice Chairman of NPower's Board of Directors, later formally presented NPower's Powerful Connections award to Mr. Chambers, which he received along with a standing ovation.

Other high points of the evening were spotlights on three recent graduates of NPower's unique Technology Service Corps (TSC), all of whom endured incredible challenges growing up, but who turned their lives around through the program. Richard Soto, who manages IT for dozens of sites affiliated with the New York Foundling Hospital; Nadine Harris, who now fights poverty herself at the Robin Hood Foundation; and Frank Rogers, an IT manager for Lutheran Social Services of New York City, shared details of their personal stories with guests and thanked them for their support of NPower and TSC. Later, NPower's Board of Directors surprised Mr. Soto with the Jeff Walker Community Service Award, a $1,000 annual prize for the TSC graduate who most effectively embodies the program's ethic of community leadership and service. The award is named after NPower co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Jeffrey Walker.

More than $400, 000 was raised at the event to help support NPower's work. Corporate sponsors included Accenture, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Tata Consultancy Services, Cisco, Novell, EMC, NetApp, Proskauer Rose LLP, BlueWater Communications, CA, Dell Inc, Greenberg Traurig LLP, Hewlett-Packard Company, Hitachi Data Systems, Iron Mountain Inc., Level 3 Communications, Northrop Grumman, Red Hat, The Staubach Company, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Thomson Reuters, Verizon and World Wide Technology. Individual major sponsors included Frank Bisignano, Raymond G. Chambers, Barbara Chang and Jerry Colonna, and Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Walker.

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