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Teamwork is an essential part of volunteering. With the number of people who want to lend their time and services, as well as companies who want to provide helping opportunities to their employees while raising their corporate social responsibility profile, the question then becomes: how to organize all these resources for maximum effect?

The Australian Government has been supportive of volunteering since the 1960s. Volunteer work in Asia is a vital option for Australians who want to make a positive contribution to poverty reduction, sustainable development and cross-cultural understanding.

A challenge often confronting volunteer programs is the imbalance of supply and demand. The demand side reflects the capacity of NGOs operating in a particular domain, while supply denotes the number of people who are willing to volunteer their time and skill in the service of that domain.

The National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) in Singapore aims to be a first-stop centre, catalyst and networking agency to foster volunteerism. It leads initiatives to fill gaps in volunteerism, philanthropy and capacity building, as well as creates opportunities for partners to work together to bring about significant changes.

The Asia pacific region is in the process of rapid, yet uneven development. Geography, diversity and, more often than not, weak central governance, all factor in an environment where volunteerism becomes a valuable component in achieving progress. According to AusAID, the Australian Government’s aid program, “Generating shared and sustainable economic growth is the single most important objective for the Asia-Pacific region over the next ten years.”

The country’s well-acclaimed ballet directors Tony Fabella, Eddie Elejar and Luther Perez have since 1994, successfully trained street children living in urban poor communities to be young dance professionals.

Without a doubt, there are many other individuals and organizations in the region who practice art philanthropy that were not included in the 2009 Forbes List such as the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation in Hong Kong. Founded in 2005, one of its missions is to promote Chinese arts and culture.

It does so by promoting creative arts education by providing free arts education programs (seminars and workshops on art, photography, writing, etc.) for young people in Hong Kong and supporting education of Chinese nationals abroad.

The 2009 Forbes List of Heroes of Philanthropy featured several individuals heading organizations that practiced art philanthropy. They are: Ronnie Chan and Yu Pang Lin of Hong Kong, Kazuo Inamori and Kagemasa Kozuki of Japan, The Kwee family and Wee Cho Yaw of Singapore, Park Young-ju of South Korea, Chen Tei Fu of Taiwan, and Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi of Thailand.

Philanthropy comes in many forms, focusing on a wide array of worthy causes, one of which is art. In fact, one of the largest bequests ever given in the history of Philanthropy was to art -- $424 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by the managers of the Reader’s Digest fortune.

In Asia, China’s state-run media network, CCTV’s round-the-clock coverage of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province led to an outpouring of donations and the distribution of aid to millions of families. CCTV also put up a link to the Red Cross Society of China and gave details on how to donate on its English website.