hi everyone my name is aarti and i'm from connect4 we will begin now um so i have i have myself with me uh my colleague kritika on behalf of the connect4 team i'd like to thank you all for tuning in into the webinar uh where we hope to identify and discuss some tough and unaddressed yet uh unaddressed questions uh from the perspective of csr before we begin i would like to remind all the participants to be on mute uh for the session to avoid any kind of background noise to interfere with the ongoing session uh however if there is anything any question any questions that you need to ask our speakers uh the chat section is available to you uh we will be doing a quick uh q a at the end of the session um however uh if any of these of your questions remain unanswered uh please feel free to add it to the feedback form that we will be sharing um sharing uh and you can and we will address it and revert to you offline also as many of you all might be aware uh connect4 is a volunteering platform where we match uh volunteers to different ngos um based on their time and skill presence um volunteer uh uh we specially curate customized volunteering engagements for both uh individuals and corporate organizations they are keeping in mind their preferences of all stakeholders we have over 450 plus ngo partners across india and more than 20 000 uh volunteers on our platform we work across nine course verticals environment uh community development education just to name a few uh moving on uh we truly appreciate the call that the corporate organizations are looking ahead at a brighter future in the fight against covet with the help of their csr and covet relief programs while they have the willingness to do it they all they need assistance uh to smoothly transition to the dynamic trends that are grappling employ volunteers in this social space in india mandatory csr has encouraged companies to look beyond financial performance and equally emphasize on social and environmental responsibilities this mandate has evolved over the past seven years uh guiding the companies to strategically create a social impact so through this webinar we aim to discuss some of these questions uh that are yet to be unanswered um and uh and through the uh to the perspective of csr and volunteering um moving ahead i would like to introduce to you all our panel of speakers present with us today um we have ashwini saxena with us who has over 30 years of experience across the range of sectors ppps skill development etc uh across india and africa uh karnatay he is the ceo of jsw foundation um we have ripped who is the co who is a corporate social responsibility and diversity inclusion professional with over eight years of experience presently responsible for leading the csr and and the dni function of jl india next we have with us who comes with over 25 years of experience in advising clients on governance related matters including project audits csr advisory pre-grant and post-grant assessments partner evaluations fundraising advisory and impact studies uh rohit has set up the north not for profit and csr advisory vertical as a separate business unit within grant forton uh first eight six years ago lastly we have balaji she's the ceo and a managing director at toolbox india foundation and she's also the founder of social lens consulting and is amongst the pioneers of advertising advising uh non-per profit on organization development and strengthening requirements thank you firstly to all the speakers for joining us today thank you so much for the introduction uh to begin with um to the first question let's dive into the discussion right now um so the first question uh of today's uh discussion between uh can our an employee spencer spent on volunteering quantified monitoring valued against the uh required csr defense so uh would you like to begin answering this question uh thank you artie thank you for that question uh so i think or the ask spent by the volunteers can be and cannot be quantified uh in my perspective it probably depends on the kind of project or in which the employees are being engaged uh no doubt uh as per the csr rules shared by mca the organizations can include the salary of the csr staff as a csr spend but it has to be included under the admin overhead which cannot be which cannot exceed five percent to the total csr expended job but it also allows uh to include the volunteer salary expenses which can be factored in terms of a complete project or a program cost uh but i think uh it is very important for an organization to understand what are they claiming as a csr spend and what are what it cannot be claimed as a csr spend because in terms of an employee volunteering programs there can be different types of initiatives it can be you know one-off activities and then can be a long-term projects which uh engages the employees and train them to execute that project and those projects actually the outcome of this project depends on the intervention of those employees so in that particular scenario where the outcome is purely dependent on the intervention of the volunteers i feel it's truly justified to claim that volunteer expense as a csr expense uh but yeah so i think it's a very fine line and uh we need to be mindful of how we are taking it ahead and you know a lot of organization uh have different framework towards employee volunteering a few of them keep employee volunteering very separate from the csr and i know few of them ah and but uh these days i think everybody is trying to do their best in whatever uh is good for the society and uh it's best for the society so i feel where the impact is more and can be measurable should be included into csr and where you think is one-off activity whether it's just purely employee engagement and you're just getting that fun element with the beneficiaries we should just step away and not include that volunteer time into the csr spend so that's my view here thank you thank you so much uh rohit would you like to give your perspective to this uh rule you're on mute yeah uh in a sense it's it's uh you know in employee volunteering is is is difficult to measure and uh you know as my esteemed speaker you know mentioned there are different types of volunteering you know you could have a one-time volunteering or you could have a long-term kind of a capacity building uh kind of volunteering sort of program um however uh you know uh um uh you know when you look at csr per se um you know i think uh you know one need to see what the rules uh you know uh actually say and one also needs to look at precedence uh uh largely speaking i agree uh you know that some part of employee volunteering can be taken as csr however if you look at the rules in india per se while it in 2014 they started off uh including employ or you know allowing for this monetization in 2016 uh you know there were a listing of faqs where it was specifically excluded uh so largely speaking i you know in you know in my uh experience of advising companies uh you know whenever there is a gray area many companies actually keep away from uh you know the inclusion so it's it's like uh you know um donating your own products or a shared value uh uh project something which is you know in a gray zone uh many companies would like to keep away from uh you know actually including and uh i also feel that at a maximum uh it can be included in that five percent as capacity building uh you know if the program is structured like that but i really haven't found too many companies who who've actually uh gone ahead and done that quantification and included it in their uh annual reports uh ashwini vijaya would you like to add on to uh and quantify the work but we don't claim it as a csra initiative and i think the reason is very simple uh i mean uh we do get into this discussion many a number of times whether this qualifies as csr or not uh i i would like to you know take this question a little bit further than that that why is it so important that anything and everything that you do uh should be getting captured somewhere as your cost or as your expenditure and should be accounted for because at the end of the day when people are because let's not not look at volunteerism only from the lens of whether it qualifies within csr expenditure or not let's also look at what are the values you know that you derive by getting monitoring activities done and if those values are a uh synonym synonymous and synchronous with the uh value system that your organization seems to possess and that you know it also gives that feel-good factor to your employees which incidentally i'm sure there must be a lot of hr experts sitting here which incidentally happens to be one of the most important you know factors when people decide about working with a company or not i think this this this you know takes this whole discussion to a different level that you know whether it whether it doesn't get captured as a cost or as an expenditure in csr or not the fact that you are demonstrating your ability as a socially responsible corporate citizen those who are constituents of that you know entity are also demonstrating their uh responsibility towards the society and actually feel better about it by doing so so i've got lots of examples from from my organization you know at a time i'll talk about it thank you thank you so much uh with so moving ahead um the second question uh is towards ashwini so how will you ensure that the time spent on volunteering happens during workers and is integrated into uh once kras so would you like to answer that question uh okay um see one thing is uh as i've been uh we always believe that people should be uh linked to volunteering opportunities based on what they're really passionate about and i think you just mentioned briefly at the beginning or i think we talked about it that there should be some feel-good factor or some fun factor you know attached to monitoring that's what makes it so exciting so so i think uh so from that perspective what we have done is you know uh we have defined a number of programs uh where we believe there is an opportunity for people to volunteer so for example there is a malnutrition program very close to bombay uh our headquarters uh from there you know people can just go during the day and they can come back so on any of the working saturdays uh people are you know kind of it's a kind of an internal competition amongst different teams who would like to go and do what and people get you know involved in not just the implementation of the program but also in terms of going and talking to the community to seek their perspective so if the csr team has done an implementation of the program they should not go around taking a feedback from the community whether they find the program useful or not useful so volunteering is not just about doing some activity it is sometimes also about people going and taking feedback from the community and coming back and sharing you know the insights to us that this is something which is happening very good and this is something which is not happening good so in a sense you know we get some kind of um uh i would say monitoring feedback also and then uh there are some you know programs which have a lot of fun element around that so so for example we do a lot of mangrove restoration work so the entire port team you know finds it a fun day you know if only any any working day they would all put on their gum boots and their you know safety equipment etc and everybody would like to get a little dirty you know by doing the transplantation of mangroves inside the you know marshy areas around the seacoast so it's great fun similarly school children from our own gender with their mondays they are picked up people from our community are victor we recently did some you know i would say sprucing up of the vasil station so what we did is we picked up all these school children and the people from our you know plant uh jsw is also incidentally into paint manufacturing so we took our own pins and we went and you know we kind of contributed by painting the entire investigation you know afresh so fun factor uh devoting at least one saturday per month i think those are the kind of things that we're doing but when it comes to actually as i said the philosophy is why should we be reporting it as a csr expenditure or as a csr activity it's it's more of a of i would say hr enrichment activity that's the lens with which we have been working on it and as far as integrating into krs certainly it can be done uh in a sense that you know as people move in the ladders uh we always you know rate them or assess them for the uh for the fact that whether they've been able to build capacities of people down the line or not so in terms of uh whether they are being able to you know demonstrate that empathy that managerial capability uh whether they are sharing it with their own internal stakeholders internal team members or whether they are being able to do it with the communities i think that that is something which can certainly be integrated and for a specific team between one team and the other you can always create a sense of competition and uh actually use a 360 degree approach so if five people from the team have gone and done uh in fact we've done it uh not i would say in a very methodical manner but for example a six member team has gone to do some uh you know hand washing stations being established at one of the anwardi centers in bulgar where we do a lot of my nutrition work how each one of them behaved how each one of them learned something or unlearned something new i think that gets captured in a you know candid discussion after the event is over after the field visit is over and i think it all adds up to the kra's somewhere or the other because somebody would be reporting to somebody and i think that gets captured into some of their you know behavioral patterns so in that sense certainly it can be built into the krs in in our country i think we've not been capturing it uh primarily for one of the reasons as i said um that you know we look at it more from a human enrichment point of view but certainly it can be captured should not be an issue at all thank you so much uh for giving your uh thought to this uh question would you like to add to this what uh what are you all doing at jln yeah sure arty yes uh so uh in general with uh we have kind of uh have a very separate volunteering program and of course we don't claim that uh as a csr initiative or a csr spend but of course we link it to the focus areas we'll be focusing on so it need not to be uh very out of what we're doing as an organization it will be somewhere within the focus area is focusing on and uh from the perspective of including it to carry i have a very different perspective here i think uh putting into kra might change the whole concept of volunteering how it was started no doubt we are progressing towards it and a lot of organization are equipping those implementing the csr as a goal or you know participating in employer volunteering as one of the soft goals in the krm but i feel uh we should give them an open sleep we should not put any uh goals or any kind of demarcation where that okay you need to volunteer and then that's how you get an add-on plus 10 or plus 20 to it it should be purely volunteering and should come from inside how we can motivate people to participate is giving them that much of opportunities because everybody has a different cause which they want to focus upon and uh in an organization you need not be able to fulfill everybody's cause uh but uh try to uh have that soft uh corner for the employees who actually come back to you and say okay this is what i want to focus upon can you help me on that so i feel my career i have got a lot of requests from the volunteers uh thankfully i have been around people who come back to me say okay this is what i want to do now can you just help me so i say okay within the organization uh uh perspective i can help you with that much but yeah you're on a personal friend if you want to go out and step out and do something i'm absolutely fine and i'll help you in whatever way i can so i think that sense of motivation when an employee gets uh that employees come back and uh you know ensures that the person includes themselves in the voluntary activities being hosted by the organization also so so it's very important to give that push to the employees by uh giving them that much ample of opportunities to volunteer across so yeah that's my take on it and uh again on the uh whether it should be included in the office hours or it should be outside i think it doesn't matter how the employees are spending their time or the volunteers but yeah we in an organization with jll we always encourage the volunteering within the office hours that's how we we don't ask them to do go out on over weekends or spend times beyond their working us but if someone was willing to uh we don't stop them from there so that's how we do it okay thank you thank you so much uh sritika there is a question um that has been asked in the chat section uh do the monetary contributions during volunteering we are part of csr spend like uh in an educational project for sponsoring student fees uh anu and mole has asked us this question would anyone of you always would like to answer this yeah yeah so i think uh the cost uh of a csr program uh typically can be included uh under uh you know the csr spit uh even if you don't include the employee volunteering portion even though the employee volunteering part is actually part of the execution or the implementation of the program however there are many instances uh where even the call is not included uh so for example if you take uh hcl's power of one program uh where employees put in one rupee a day and also volunteer uh one hour uh you know every month the matching contribution i mean and it all goes towards scholarship programs uh uh the neither is the employee giving portion uh uh obviously but in this case even the company contribution is over and above their csr budget so this entire program of uh employee volunteering the power of one uh even though technically uh you know the uh the the matching part from the company or the cost associated with that program can be included at csr spend however to be more conservative etc i mean this is one example where even the matching contribution towards the scholarship is totally outside the ambit of csr in fact you know i would like to give an example where one of our plant locations uh there is a there is a competition of volunteering between one department and the other so within the same plant there are different teams you know one is a blast furnace team another one is coke team etc etc and they kind of partner along with their spouses or family members and they they define what kind of a project they would like to take up they put their own resources time etc that's that's completely up to them and amongst themselves the plant management then decides you know which one did the best job and you know who needs to be recognized for their effort and obviously there's a lot of facilitation done by the plant management also for that but that really gets ever captured you know and nobody looks at it from that lens because as i said it's more about the enrichment of lives of the employees you know in terms of feeling so great about something that they could achieve as a team as a family together and which has also brought in some positivity in some other somebody else's life so i think you know it goes back to the same you know question in the beginning that should it qualify as a csr expenditure or not is not so important i mean if you ask me the total amount of expenditure that you do through volunteering activities what percentage would it be of your total csr budget maybe not even one percent if you really capture it so is that really such a big thing that we have to be dis discussing about whether it is going to qualify this is an expenditure or not uh i think you have rightly uh uh captured or what we wanted to answer uh from these questions so uh moving on uh vijaya this question is directed towards you uh employ volunteering aside can long term uh capacity building uh and mentoring uh by senior management to be considered as csr or is there any way to measure the impact of the same well i think you know a toolbox since we've been running skilled volunteering only and our flagship program is really pro bono management consulting through skilled volunteering i believe that over the last nine and a half years that we've been working in the space that there is a definite uh evidence that skilled structured volunteering can address uh capacity building requirements of organizations okay and again you know uh to deconstruct capacity building a little bit it's you know there's capacity building at an organization level which is where the uh you know the the so-called management consulting piece comes in and this capacity building is at a people level at a community level at a program level uh but i also go back to what uh ripper nandan alluded to in the beginning uh to undertake capacity building uh and to demonstrate the impact and maybe even to consider it as you know going above the csr spends uh by by any particular corporate that will call for a certain amount of training context setting uh and identifying those elements of capacity building that uh the volunteering is going to address so i think if one is able to to kind of uh link these up very effectively uh it's possible to do that uh you know we've seen mentoring again you know a lot of it has already been said and covered you know ashwini spoke about uh how you know you know volunteering has been largely uh been to address the the social consciousness the to demonstrate the uh social responsibility that organizations and its people are able to demonstrate and to undertake uh and so we've seen uh mentoring uh where you've had senior senior management uh um individuals who've who've been like sort of business coaches to non-profit leaders uh you've had hr managers who who've done some sort of um you know mentoring and coaching for say hr managers and non-profits and now increasingly we see a lot of leveraging of corporate talent towards the employment readiness uh for the underserved adolescent youth groups so i do believe that there is uh an excellent transference of experience of learnings and of skills it's it's very important that we are able to structure it i we're able to tie in all the pieces and join the i dots uh today you have very rightly answered the question uh ashrae rohit repuddaman would you like to add on to what vijaya has said i know i think vijay has very aptly put it you know that capacity building and mentoring has always gone gone hand in hand uh and i think somewhere uh you know it's just not been captured in that sense you know saying that this is something that we've done as a part of our volunteering experience or whatever so and i i would say that again from the lens of volunteering if i look at it it's also about mentoring happening both ways uh learning from your partners and passing on your learnings to the partners i think it's a two-way process and uh so if volunteering derives value it drives value not just for the partner institution but also for the corporate and i think if if we can work on both the levels i mean if we try to capture it in both ways i think then it would become much more enriching rather than as if you know there's one given and there's one taker absolutely i think ashwini has just kind of brought that up because i think in the earlier part of the discussion there was a question around you know how do you look at it from an extra perspective i actually look at it more from a reverse learning perspective it is one of the things we've been tracking have we been able to enable a lot of our volunteers to develop a lot innovation and get thinking and solution design when there is a constraint and resources have you been able to look at what kind of leadership uh at at at an individual level and what are those other attributes uh that you've actually gleaned and developed through the volunteering experience yeah i i just like to you know add in with the gsk's example so black sauce i mean very aptly uh sort of uh demonstrates exactly what ashwini has been you know has just mentioned so they have a a volunteering program called the pulse program which is actually to develop senior leaders so it's a very prestigious volunteering program which actually goes on for three months and it it cross it is a crisscross across the globe so there is actually an application process from you know gsk employees all over the world and ngos apply all over the world and when there is this matching under the pulse program uh it is actually meant in the criteria to not only pass on the learnings to the ngo but it is very prestigious uh for the people to get into this program uh because these are the you know the high performers and the future leaders who actually get get the importance to uh be part of this program and of course it they do not claim it on the csr they they talk about it as a corporate social responsibility program uh so it might be under the csr banner along with the employee engagement banner uh in the company but under the rules per se or you know if you look at it within the indian perspective uh they do not claim the as csrt see growth in fact you know at a different uh in a different discussion i think it's very important that while we may not like to capture it as an expenditure but uh whether we capture it as an expenditure or not but whether it is going to get captured as a contribution i think is very important absolutely because because the way i look at csr laws in our country they only look at uh you know csr spending as another pot of money money and uh i i'm not shying away from saying it or even on a public platform that every single state government has come up with a csr authority or advisory and the central government keeps on saying that no no our rules don't permit all this but yet it is all being you know you know being developed uh and each one comes with their own uh different way of looking at csr uh so where where you are looking at csr from that lens that it's another part of money i'm sure final nuances like volunteering and people's contributions i think the skill sets that people from the private sector kind of complement with these skill sets available in the voluntary sector or say the public sector i think that is where i think volunteering can make a big dent even if we don't capture it it will actually make a big debt by telling the people uh that you know when you talk about any company don't look at it as another you know dollar sign or a pot of money but it's also a pot of expertise and that expertise can be very well demonstrated to one dream agree absolutely very rightly um moving on to the next question uh considering that uh csr is recommended to take place in local communities doesn't empower engagement necessarily lead to an a local and a communal would you like to answer this question uh yeah sure thank you arti uh so i think i would say like i mentioned earlier every organization has a very different framework of executing the csr program and the employee monitoring program but i think the question we should ask here is are we actually measuring the impact of employee engagement volunteering as rigorously as the csr projects impact because i feel we do a lot of employee volunteering activities a lot of organization uh but the impact measurement is not done to the extent which has been done as a csr project so i'll give you uh an example from a previous organization uh there used to be two different uh two separate teams one was an employee volunteering team and the other one is a csr team so under the employee volunteering team uh there used to be a lot of employee volunteering opportunities which were created for the employees and that program which was created for the employees was actually run and executed by the employees only there was no uh the third party intervention was not there it was all volunteers doing uh on their own with their own expertise no doubt the impact they created was good but we never claimed it into a csr uh you know csr project or csr activity whereas a similar project which was executed by csr team which is of course also the focus area of education uh but here the intervention was done by a third party they actually the third party got on board they trained the volunteers to go out and execute that project and that's how they measure the impact of that volunteering in that particular project so i think uh the whole idea or the uh i think the question should be whether how rigorously we should measure the impact of the employee engagement and if not necessary every activity will lead to an impact like i mentioned earlier few might be those one-off events or the fun activities which might not have that much of impact which we are expecting from a csr project uh but yeah so this is an in presently uh like the law says that you know the organization need to focus on the uh the areas around the organization where they're working or operating in but i think a lot of organization has stepped out and they are actually uh trying to do projects or even the act volunteering activities beyond their operational areas uh for example for us also uh though we are a real estate organization it doesn't matter where our corporate office is uh but we ensure that even if we are doing a project in somewhere in kolkata we we totally sponsor the cause because we believe in the cause so we don't necessarily see okay because the corporate office is only in mumbai we need to do something in and around mumbai we see where the need is actually and we focuses on that particular area so i think that thought process and that ideology has changed over a period of time and a lot of organization and in fact uh because how that ideology was as per my uh perspective it started was because manufacturing plants were in and around the local areas and they were impacting the societies so that's how uh the manufacturing units and the plants started saying that okay let let's uh let us come together and benefit the society what we can do from there where we actually uh taking so much of resources so let's put something back to that society so so that's my point of view here thank you uh would you like to add on to this yeah just to adding on to you know what has already been covered by buddha i think that uh there is a lot of opportunity in local communities right uh across plant locations uh there is a need i mean i think the what we see i mean by virtue of plant locations being where they are far away from the rural from the urban landscape you actually see new things emerging many times a lot of it is being done but you know i think the the the the narrative is slightly different here i mean there is volunteering uh and then there is csr now there will be points of uh uh convergence uh and there's things which are going to run parallely you know during the covet we saw a bunch of migrants uh painters who were actually trekking their way back to their uh villages who actually uh were halted in a village on the way and they actually painted the school walls now how it what is the impact that you're going to actually i mean if you want to talk about is it measurable impact for me it's meaningful impact because they actually did something so very valuable with their time and with what they could i think that is the grain of volunteering uh and like uh like it has all been said everything that is done as part of volunteering need not be measured you know we were all part of the task force for the india 75 initiative right and uh it's it's running and you know right from the time that professor c.k prahlad said that if this is the uh capability of the trained demographic that india has and you could actually put a monetized value so i don't want to go into the history of all of that but i think what all of us have a collective responsibility is to drive meaningful volunteering and a meaningful impact the measurability of it will not anyway figure what is it that we want to measure the extent we want to measure uh you know i remember working on the monetized value itself and you know i remember uh the earlier brand customer and dr mukhin raj and sharing that committee where we said we came up with a rajan calculator uh what is should be considered as a value to put on uh volunteering can you actually assign a sort of monetized value and you know one of my esteemed co-speakers as i already are you did that there are a lot of organizations who are not really reporting that out that value i don't think has any uh great purpose to it i think what all of us are really looking at is meaningful impact regardless of the kind of volunteering you do that's that's my take on it right he said uh rohit would you like to give your perspective uh really i have not much to add uh i think the uh my uh you know the uh steam speakers have covered uh you know uh you know most of what i wanted to say you know in my limited uh understanding what i've observed is that with employee volunteering happening around your plant area whether it's a limitation or whether it's a strategy it doesn't matter the fact is that you know you so-called white-collar job you know people uh sitting in in a plant boundary and sitting in a properly organized colony township going out engaging with the community realizing that you know just outside your boundary walls what kind of hardships people are living in and yet they are you know equal human beings like you i think it it it brings in a lot of humility and it creates that connect with the community so so i think from that perspective it's it's it's very important that people do engage with the local communities and uh that that brings in that empathy which i think is a very important virtue for any of those workers you know as they grow up or they you know you know they perform more complex operations within that you know business where they are so in terms of engagement with the local communities i think it's it's very important and i think that should be the essence of volunteering uh if i may put it like that at least for um companies like uh and and one can always define you know that what are your core communities one of our business verticals is into only data processing it provides business solutions to all the group companies so for them what they've done is that they've defined their communities as the uh locations of the localities where their employees are living so their employees are their brand ambassadors so around those communities around those localities they define a lot of volunteering activities as well as csr activities and that gives them that connect you know that it uh it kind of brings value to the organization also it brings value to the communities by virtue of the things that are done there and also it brings value to the people that they're able to connect themselves better as a constitutional to the society i think that that that's the way my take you know i would like to look at what interviewing in that sense um i think people come in with a question here from uh one of our participants anu and what i've understood from the question typed into the chat box is um around whether volunteering virtual volunteering um is something that corporates have been moving towards during lockdown and if it's beneficial you need to volunteering are there any ways of issues i think your voice is not clear is it clear for everyone no i missed the last part i missed the last part of her question yeah the question is that how to organize uh volunteering during covet time through virtual platforms as in rural areas they can be issues from beneficiaries and like network connectivity also the uh the resistance of not knowing how to connect virtually so i'm gonna just take a stab at this uh very quickly and then uh allow my other speaker co-speakers to uh rain so uh i think virtual volunteering um is something that is here to stay in some shape or form may not in its entirety i know uh even before covert two years ago we went virtual with a lot of our volunteering primarily because we couldn't physically reach organizations which were in the rural landscape right and i think for all of us who are intermediaries and running volunteering programs uh going digital is is imperative corporate 19 just catalyzed that okay it catalyzed a lot of other things including digital adoptions now at a community level uh and and you know through the through our formats multi-formats where we've also been talking to non-profits uh yes i think i think there is there are some amount of bandwidth issues but i think um i think to to dispel some of the uh typical stereotyping that we've also done it is possible to engage in some form of volunteering okay uh and not all the volunteering will be virtual i mean let's just look at what happened in the cities right i mean even through covet even through lockdown we had a huge number of civil society individuals organizations personal volunteering where people were going and distributing food if required at the stations on the sramik trains they were going to nsci they were at bangalore palace grounds uh we've had people going into the underserved urban slums even now whether it's on menstrual hygiene um distribution of food menstrual pads and so on so i think uh i think we're going to see blended versions uh and uh i think uh this is this is really embracing technology uh with the with the pluses and the minuses and we'll we will find uh my thing is always start with one thing which we know we can deliver through because it is a new medium it is a new form of this thing i mean a lot of fellowships social impact fellowships are running virtually online of course we don't have the touch and feel of the ground right now but we are looking at blended models today um um would you like to add on to this question i know i think has very nicely explained the blending of the virtual volunteering with the on-ground volunteering and that's what we are going forward looking at uh and she also rightly mentioned that a virtual volunteering was there before covert as well uh from my past experience i worked with tcs and they used to be under tata sustainability group there used to be a program called data engage which was all completely virtual and it's a long term skill based volunteering where you know there's a platform where you nominate yourself you'll get the training online you need to execute the project by sitting at home and then deliver it and upload it on the portal itself no doubt it has its uh own challenges like the one of the challenge which uh one of the participants asked that in the ruler areas how how can we manage that uh so i think we're still to explore uh and we are on this journey because uh this is actually the poet 19 as catalyst this whole virtual piece and then everybody is trying to figure out the best possible way to address that particular situation so that's my take on this i think yeah can you help one more question that was asked by shruti bhangra is can you help me with one virtual voluntary opportunity that can have a huge scale and impact in a day or a week for volunteering i think i think this is a question for you guys for the connect yeah of course we do have a version i will get back to you on this later um if we can come in with one more question from bhavia yeah i think if my audio isn't clear i'd suggest you just use it yeah i will do that she wants to understand who employee engagement is a very important although employee engagement is very important for an organization how important it is for organizations to have people who are from the development of social sector actually worked on the phd to be a part of the office a csr team because i feel it can motivate the volunteers and will also enhance the psr activity of the organization well i think it's i think it's fairly important i think a development sector professional i'm not one let me just put the biggest disclaimer out there i'm not one i came into the sector completely by accident but i think uh i think what's wonderful is that they bring in a lot of understanding of ground challenges right and what you want for the volunteer you need somebody who's able to translate that into a language into a into a manner that the volunteer is able to understand okay you go to a business head and tell him that this is an organization which needs uh you know they need to have a better financial planning system in place and for somebody who's used to looking at lakhs and crores on a balance sheet he's going to look at it differently that kind of sensitization that understanding of what is actually there on the ground uh bringing it back to uh across employees in an organization is so beautifully done when you bring that i i don't see them as two separate worlds we are now looking at csr employee volunteering whatever we want to do is really the two halves that make up that uh coin you know or that word they're not two sides of i mean they're not like you flip the coin it's just on the same coin two uh the two halves that blend beautifully so i think it's it's essential over to all of you please so i think i'll just give you the example of my own journey uh i am qualified as a b tech i'm an engineer by qualification and i was campus-based in pcs and then i started my journey as a volunteer there so i used to participate in a lot of activities and from and i had this kind of bend towards helping others right from my college or state and then i thought okay this is something okay there's something called ps4 also which exists and corporate and that's how i landed here so i'm saying this there is a lot of opportunities for people who actually want to and they really can help others to develop so i think some better name yeah okay so so what you think and then whatever i've learned uh starting from it's it's all on ground with working with within this particular profile and once i was kind of for okay that i know what are the challenges what are the practical implementations of this particular process that was the time when i after i think working for almost two or two and a half years i thought let me just learn and go back and read what is the history of cs what is it saying and it really helped me because i could relate okay this is how i practically implemented it and this is what exactly the theory says so i kind of blend in all uh my experience and uh where i valuable studying for my certification in csr so i think uh it's not necessary that you have to have that uh theoretical knowledge but i think the practical knowledge also helps at a lot of time it does for me of course it does but i'm not sure about how it uh uh it will help for other people but yeah i should say that if you have to take a motivation from my journey i think this ample of opportunities where people can you know pave their path on their own and can do what they actually want to do so that's what i want to share from the people that i know a lot of them are not from the sector like not not done vsw or msw but i have mine myself i'm from a i started off my journey as a geoscientist and then moved into rural development and then moved into csr after some years so i think you know the the the advantage of uh working with volunteers who are not from the sector is that sometimes they don't take anything as obvious and therefore they challenge uh that process i am not an msw and i'm surrounded by msws so i keep on asking you know like the layman i keep on asking but why do you do it like this you know so this innocuous looking uh you know very humble question you know then puts triggers of a lot of mines and then the solutions start pouring out so i think the the advantage of having volunteers who are not from the development sector sector has an advantage because they are going to ask the challenge the status quo one of my first projects when i started working in the development space was in hand loops i had never seen a village urban i'd born and brought up in a city i had never seen a loop what is alum i just knew fabric so but as a process as a part of your work you have to go sit with them understand them learn from them and also ask all these why questions you know so why do you do it like this why is it so and so why is it so and so and i think it was a great learning experience for me but i could also challenge a lot of things you know the way they were doing it and that triggered of a lot of you know solutions coming from them only which was the beauty of it so i think uh from a from a i would say efficiency perspective if developmental people go with developmental people they would always say okay both of us know about it so no big deal but the moment you have an engineer going with an nsw the engineer is going to ask some very very critical process related questions cost related questions on something which is being done and you know maybe he would look at the ergonomics of it or whatever i mean there could be any number of you know ways in which this discussion and can be can be enriched so it's had some mutual learning process in the sense and the empathy that gets passed on from the development professional to an engineer who for whom and i think this is a struggle uh this is not a struggle i would say but this is a point of discussion always where when we sit in our csr governing council across all plant locations we always keep on telling them that you know what within the plant boundaries your manufacturing process every single parameter is under your scatter control unfortunately and i would say fortunately in the outside world nothing is scatter controlled everything is so dynamic what is discussed today in the morning would change by the afternoon so and therefore you have to learn with so many you know kind of challenges or i would say you know uncertainties that it kind of hones you in a very different way altogether and that's how the project delivery in a typical csr or a developmental program would be so different the way you would deliver a project within the plant boundaries not saying that there are no challenges there but the parameters are very much within your control so i think it's a mutual learning process in that sense i think bhavia your answer has been uh your question has been answered rightly uh uh rohit there's this one question uh that has been asked by sri rank is there any section in the act which is uh related to employee volunteering is there any uh no no so it there's nothing uh there was it was in 2014 it got removed and uh so now you know there's really nothing uh you know which they just want you to spend money [Laughter] there's nothing in the act okay all right uh moving on uh the the last question on our agenda today is uh if employee engagement was considered as csr can and what can volunteering be done by the volunteer honest on their own be counted as uh as volunteering art by a corporate so i um i i i can answer this question from my heart and my mind so if i answer from my mind i would say no because technically speaking employees should go with what the corporate has structured for them and also because like ashwini said it's important for corporates to be able to capture it i mean if not under csr it's important to capture the hours spent etc and in a way if it is that is done in an ad hoc manner it would not would not really be possible to actually capture it there are many corporates who encourage employees to come together and support whatever causes they want to support so for example i know adobe has this very beautiful program where employees decide which cause they want to uh you know volunteer uh both their time and money uh and uh you know and then you know they choose the ngos that they want to do but it is still structured through the company to the company portal uh etc however if if i would if i if i would really talk about a personal choice uh keeping csr aside i i think volunteering is volunteering whether it is you know personally or through the company etc it gives you the same experience the same set of motivations and personally a lot of times again uh you know i'm saying this on a public forum but a lot of times say a csr day or etcetera gets attached to uh more of branding and more of the senior leadership being there so it in a sense it loses the passion it becomes like another event and another bandwagon to be seen as doing and i and i personally uh don't like to be part of those i i personally like to do it very quietly in my own time uh so and that so i've answered you know the question both with what it technically should be you know from my mind and you know through the structure etc but i've also given you my personal choice uh and uh you know uh and uh what typically sometimes happens in corporates when there is spontaneous uh not long-term uh structured uh volunteering but some of these days etc tends to become cosmetic and it tends to become people volunteering for the sake of volunteering because there are senior leadership uh you know who are there during that event etc so that's something which uh i feel defeats the purpose your perspective on this i i have a different take on this and i would i would go with what you know to some extent i'll go with what rohit just said see when you when you volunteer at an individual level uh to me it's more about personal philanthropy if i may put it like that philanthropy doesn't mean that i just give money or sign of a check it could also be in kind by the time that i put in or whatever other effort i put in so so we should not be mixing up personal commitment towards social responsibility you know an individual's social responsibility with the social responsibility that is supposed to be demonstrated by an entity and a corporate entity or whatever so so so i you know my my answer or my observation may seem a little esoteric but uh my feeling is that individual or personal level philanthropy volunteering whatever word i want to put it is something which which i am supposed to do as an as an element of the society and therefore you know we should not take it off from the individual and turn it into more of a corporate affair because then you know it takes the whole society into a very very different direction altogether and we see that quite prominently today in our society that whatever is personal is closely guarded and whatever is not personal which is social or communal or state or national level kind of a thing that is something which i'm not bothered about so my responsibility is only for me or at best for you know my immediate kitten kim so i think it if we turn volunteering also into a kind of a situation where it is more about buying off an individual's ability to contribute to the society as a corporate entity i think it is going to create some serious challenges you know i think a lot has been already said right i think uh again i think you know i firmly believe that volunteering um you know at an individual level at a corporate level i i you know a toolbox we get we get like hundreds of volunteers you know we have about 300 volunteers on on projects through the course of a of a year and a lot of these are not formal corporate engagements okay there are a lot of people who are coming to us even now we have we have so many undeployed volunteers okay uh what is this telling us you know there is a rise in the kind of social consciousness people genuinely want to do something what is the pandemic done the pandemic has also brought in a certain amount of monotony and boredom into our lives because of the lack of anything else to do so people are like let me channelize that into doing something if i can put my time to good use and so i would like to go with that philosophy i think i think a lot of csr programs and activities are designed well they're structured well there are thrust areas there's so much happening on that and so i believe that there'll be points where uh like i said before they will they will kind of converge at some point but for the most part i think volunteering should should truly be embraced and imbibed in the spirit of what it was uh and i think organizations i think there are organizations who are being flexible saying that hey you know what uh do it during our work hours which is what the buddha alluded to they are facilitating those on plant locations uh they are saying that okay you want to go beyond the thrust areas of what our organization is doing please do it uh we will broadcast we'll promote we'll evangelize that so i come from that space that i definitely believe that uh across the world we've seen that volunteering in different shapes and form is a very valuable activity that society delivers now what is the value that it's delivering uh again is a separate beast in itself do you want to get into the measurement conundrum i would therefore just go back to saying that as long as it's meaningful as long as we know we are able to make a difference and we are also definitely gaining something in the process we should just make it happen that's it keeping in the context that there are everybody has uh you know work responsibilities there are business compulsions it doesn't take away from that it's just adding on a layer if somebody said you know that we all need personas beyond our work personas volunteering gives you one of those personas apart from your personal hobbies and passions and talent that's how i would sum it up yeah totally agreed um i'll be we will now open uh two questions uh the uh to begin with uh there was one question that was asked by a participant um that uh what is the impact of the csr equals on the csr ecosystem due to the social stock exchange introduction i know this is a long conversation for on the social stock exchange uh but rohit uh ashwini would you like to uh begin with this question would you like to answer it uh honestly it's not something which i have delved quite deeply into so i let uh you know you know actually see if we can you know throw some light on it it doesn't have any correlation to the uh you know the topic on hand uh so i don't know whether we should you know have a discussion around it or probably you know sort of definitely because it's got nothing to do with the topic yeah it's it's completely a little unrelated to the discussion topic that we have today and second i think it's when i when i look at it uh you know it's it's again the the same thought process you know which is kind of manifested here also that in a very loose crude sense i am saying that you know you can buy of carbon credits something of that sort so so therefore you know i think it's it's just a thought process which has started coming into the i would say the discussion it's too early to comment anything on that at this moment it needs to be understood well in more detail and then only i think you know it looks a very fancy idea at this moment i can tell you yeah but yeah also there's a you know it it has a mix of social impact and you know pure play uh ngo uh aspects correct so again uh i mean i i agree i mean i have not been able to you know get my arms around it i don't think there's enough proof of concept etc to me it's a very incipient idea at this moment it's it's it's a it's at a very incipient stage at this moment so even in impact investing i'll tell you i'm just giving you an internal uh thing foundation uh is looking uh jsw foundation is very keen looking at a lot of impact investing opportunities that's another area that we're trying to get into so one of my questions to these organizations we are discussing uh they were wanting us to come as an outcome investor outcome funder so to me the ethical dilemma was that if if i am not you know putting my money as a risk investor if i'm only putting my money as an outcome funder and am i simply buying off the impact generated by somebody else right the appetite that has been demonstrated by somebody else so am i simply just buying it off and saying okay this is the final you know tranche of money from my side because we've been able to win the race therefore i give you this gold medal in that sense in a very crude sense or whether it is actually an important element of the entire process because of which i can feel comfortable by claiming it that this has happened because of my contribution whatever it is as an outcome funder so i think you know from a social or you know this uh social exchange and all this that we're talking of you know i think it's it's a very nascent stage you know to be discussed i think even with the performance bonds as you're mentioning i yeah i again uh you know i there are reservations around i mean there's money but other than money i you know i am i am i simply buying off somebody's work and trying to put a claim over that or am i really contributing something significant to that all right so so we we got into a lot of discussions around that and you know i said we need to understand it better you know whether whether we are really contributing something significant to that for which we should be taking uh you know taking the credit and feel proud of it or are we simply trying to you know buy off somebody else's achievement so so to to that extent you know it's important for us to first understand this a little bit more and then talk about it looks a very fancy idea at this moment so i think i'm going to just add to what rohit already said i think right now it's a draft committee uh report which has just come out comments are still being solicited yeah i think what they do definitely want to do is i think the the two things or three things that uh that we do understand is that the possibility to explore innovation and the funding instrument itself is being has been uh you know is it's a larger rationale behind it uh they definitely want to bring in some sort of structure into it how it's going to pan out who's going to benefit uh how is it like i said it's right now it's just a draft report which has come up so there are parts of it which are still a little bit fuzzy it will slowly open up in the coming months all right um thank you so much uh thank you speakers for your insight uh thank you everyone for joining uh we would now request you all to please fill in the feedback form that's there in the chat section um also uh you can reach out to us to assist your organization creating any a virtual ecosystem where you can come together with different ngos to address ground realities of these organizations map and uh map out how to cater to their needs by creating programs to best leverage your employee skills um as i mentioned earlier if you have any questions that remain unanswered in this session please put them in the feedback form and we will get a panelists to answer these questions offline um i hope to see you all in our next session um soon we will uh also be having an uh meet and greet with all our corporate partners so you all can feel free to be a part of that where we will be answering your volunteer based questions um um i we will be sharing details of the same on on on the email as well as the whatsapp group uh thank you once again for the great work you all have been doing and uh for and have a nice evening thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thank you very much thank you so much and pleasure meeting you bye thanks thank you bye you