Read our interview with Aidan to find out why he volunteered his skills and expertise for FSI, and the five reasons why he would recommend other skilled professionals to volunteer with us!

Tell us a bit about yourself, Aidan.  

As Head of Platform Strategy for Digital Channels at UBS, I bring over 24 years of experience in digital product development and marketing. My career spans working in London, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, where I’ve built and led digital transformation teams. My core expertise includes digital platform strategy, global team leadership, and enterprise-scale digital transformation.

When and why did you volunteer for FSI’s Community Business Support team? 

I joined FSI in mid-2023 after participating in their Board Director Training Program. The organization’s mission to strengthen Hong Kong’s community businesses aligned perfectly with my goal of making meaningful local impact. I was particularly drawn to FSI’s approach of leveraging professional expertise to create sustainable social change.

What is your role as a volunteer for the Community Business Support team? What did you help the team achieve? 

As an advisor with FSI’s Community Business Support team, I’ve focused on digital marketing and strategy to empower nonprofits and strengthen community connections. My advisory work has covered essential digital areas including SEO, website architecture, content management, web analytics, and paid search campaigns. 

Throughout my engagement, I helped develop comprehensive guides and resources that enable small businesses to establish and expand their digital presence, ultimately supporting their growth and sustainability in the digital marketplace.

How would you describe this volunteer experience with FSI?

This volunteering experience has been rewarding, enabling me to apply my corporate expertise within Hong Kong’s social enterprise ecosystem. Working with FSI has provided valuable insights into the real challenges and needs of small businesses. While technology and media landscapes constantly evolve, I’ve learned that effective support often comes down to timeless principles of guidance and mentorship. This experience has transformed my perspective on professional volunteering and demonstrated how specialized skills can create lasting community impact.

Were there any memorable moments from this experience?

One particularly memorable experience was working closely with the team to develop practical digital marketing guides for small business owners. It was rewarding to translate my professional expertise into accessible resources that make a tangible difference. We created guides covering website and SEO strategies as well as digital marketing fundamentals – tailored to address the unique challenges local businesses face in establishing their online presence. This volunteer work offered me a fresh perspective on business at the grassroots level, reminding me that success isn’t limited to large-scale operations, but rather lies in empowering individuals to achieve their entrepreneurial goals.

Would you recommend FSI’s skills-based volunteering program to others? Why or why not? 

I would recommend FSI’s skills-based volunteering program to other professionals along with the Board Director Training. The programs offers a unique opportunity to:

• Make a tangible impact in Hong Kong’s social enterprise sector
• Apply professional skills in a meaningful way
• Gain new perspectives on community development
• Network with like-minded professionals
• Develop new skills and experience while giving back to the community

Are you interested in volunteering your skills and expertise to support Hong Kong’s under-resourced entrepreneurs and social impact leaders? Get in touch with us at communityconnections@shared-impact.com!

The post Find Out Why this UBS Digital Marketing Specialist Volunteered with FSI appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

For years, Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI) has been offering impactful skills-based volunteering opportunities to our corporate partners, whether through our Community Connections Program or shorter engagements available at our Community Business Support Program. This gives us the opportunity to see first-hand how companies can benefit from a well-structured, impact-driven skills-based volunteering program. And it has enhanced our ability to curate engaging corporate volunteering programs that our corporate partners’ employees are actually excited about.

Unlike traditional CSR initiatives of one-off volunteering activities, skills-based volunteering allows your employees to leverage their skills, knowledge, and expertise to help social impact organizations tackle operational or organizational challenges, which results in more lasting impact on the social impact organizations and the community they serve, as well as your employees and your company’s reputation. Additionally, skills-based volunteering is a great way for your company to achieve your ESG and CSR goals.

Some of our corporate partners have relayed stories about how Community Connections has helped them with talent retention: their employees chose to stay in the company because of the meaningful skills-based volunteering opportunities made available to them by their employers. 

In addition to allowing companies to demonstrate their commitment to social impact to their employees and stakeholders, a skills-based volunteering program also provides employees with an executive training ground, where they can practise and acquire new skills, collaborate and problem-solve with people from different sectors, and expand their knowledge and network, enabling them to initiate or inform the development of new products or services for their companies. 

“The Community Connections Program is a significant opportunity for employees to develop their leadership skills while adding tremendous value to the community,” said Usha Pillai, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship & Foundations APAC at Credit Suisse, a corporate partner of our Community Connections Program. “We have seen many instances of employees developing various skills while supporting their community and bringing these skills back to Credit Suisse in expanded roles, which is a win-win-win for all.”

Benefits of a Corporate Skills-based Volunteering Program

Here’s how a corporate skills-based volunteering program can be a win-win-win for all: 

• Professional development: When employees engage in skills-based volunteering projects, they will have to find ways to collaborate with people from different sectors and problem-solve in environments unfamiliar to them. This is how they can practise leadership, collaboration, and communication skills while acquiring new knowledge and expanding their network, all of which are beneficial to employees’ professional development. 
• Increased innovation: Exposure to new challenges and perspectives can spark creativity and innovation in your employees. The insights, knowledge, and skills gained from skills-based volunteering projects enable your employees to bring new ideas and approaches that can benefit the company. 
• Improved employee engagement and retention: When employees are given the opportunity to use their skills and knowledge to give back to the community, they often feel more engaged and fulfilled in their work. This can lead to increased job satisfaction and reduced turnover rates. 
• Increased organizational performance: Studies have shown that employees engaged in skills-based volunteering are more enthusiastic about their work, more cooperative with their colleagues, which can lead to increase in overall organizational performance. 
• Positive reputation: Companies that have effective corporate volunteering programs in place can build a positive reputation in their communities and among customers. They are also more attractive to talents looking for companies committed to driving social impact. In other words, having a skills-based volunteering program can lead to increased brand loyalty and improved public perception for the company.
• Enhanced CSR and ESG: Aligning skills-based volunteering projects with your company’s corporate social responsibility or ESG strategies is a good way to achieve CSR and ESG goals. Tracking, assessing, and communicating the impact of your company’s skills-based volunteering program allows you to demonstrate your company’s commitment to the social and environmental impact that your customers, employees, and other stakeholders care about. 

Maximize Employee Engagement, ESG, and Corporate Volunteering Initiatives with Community Connections

So how do you go about building your corporate skills-based volunteering program? The good news is that you don’t have to from scratch! 

As a corporate partner of our Community Connections Program, you can entrust us with matching your employees with skills-based volunteering projects that are aligned with your employees’ skill sets and passions as well as your company’s CSR and ESG goals. This means that you will be able to accelerate your corporate ESG or CSR initiatives while increasing engagement with your employees.

We can also equip your senior managers and leaders to be effective leaders through our Board Director Training, and connect them with our community partners that are looking for directors or advisors to join their boards. 

For employees who are new to skills-based volunteering, we can help them identify their capabilities as skilled volunteers and issues they are passionate about, set goals for their social impact journey, and match them with the right community partners and projects. 

If you would like to learn more about how Community Connections can help your company run an effective corporate volunteering program that offers training and development opportunities to your employees, get in touch with us at communityconnections@shared-impact.com! 

The post How a Corporate Skills-based Volunteering Program Can Help You Develop Talents and Give Back to Society appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Regardless of the cause of your social impact organization, you will need to have robust strategies or policies in PR and communications, marketing, finance, accounting, fundraising, legal and compliance etc. to ensure that your organization can continue to work on fulfilling its mission with financial stability. 

However, due to budget constraints, your organization may not always be able to afford to hire these subject matter experts as full-time in-house staff. 

This is where engaging skilled volunteers can serve as a solution. Here are a few ways in which skilled volunteers can help your organization build capacity:

• Providing Expertise: Much as a skilled volunteer specialized in marketing can offer insights on how your organization can engage different audiences, a skilled volunteer experienced in legal matters can offer invaluable advice on compliance issues and protection for vulnerable individuals who are amongst your beneficiaries. Engaging skilled volunteers with the right skills, expertise, and networks can enable your organization to improve its operations, develop new strategies, implement new initiatives, and even sustain long-term growth. 
• Supporting Innovation: Sometimes, it is easy to lose sight of what works best for your team and your beneficiaries and stakeholders after working on a program for a long time. Skilled volunteers can help your organization to innovate by bringing fresh perspectives, new ideas, and creative solutions to the table. This can lead to the development of innovative programs or services that are more efficient and streamlined, and that can better address the needs of the community your organization serves. 
• Strengthening Partnerships: Skilled volunteers bring in their respective networks of professionals and organizations that can be leveraged to help your organization expand its reach, increase its impact, and build a more sustainable network of support and collaboration. If you are able to find mission-aligned skilled volunteers who are passionate about your organization’s cause, consider asking them to be your ambassadors and spread the word about your organization’s work. This can enable your organization to strengthen existing partnerships and potentially build new ones with partners, collaborators, volunteers, and funders. 
• Mentorship, Coaching, and Training: Talent development is essential to employee retention and building the capacity of your team. Skilled volunteers can be leveraged to provide training, mentoring, or coaching to your organization’s leadership, staff, or volunteers. Examples include mentorship or coaching to help leaders and staff reach their professional or personal goals, training sessions to equip the organization’s staff with new skills to improve work processes, and workshops on impact assessment best practices. 

Community Connections: Connecting Your Organization with High-calibre, Mission-aligned Skilled Volunteers

At Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI), we have enabled numerous successful engagements between skilled volunteers and community partners through our Community Connections Program. 

What makes our program different is that we are dedicated to cultivating an in-depth relationship with our community partners, starting with helping them identify their organization’s key challenges and needs. We then connect our community partners with skilled volunteers whose skills, expertise, and passion are aligned, and we continue to provide all parties with the support they need to see the engagements to fruition. 

Since taking over the Community Connections Program, we at FSI have connected under-resourced but high-impact community partners with the board of directors, marketing advisors, legal advisors, and other subject matter experts to design marketing strategies, draft contracts, establish risk management frameworks, enhance work processes, offer a variety of advisory support, and overall, build capacity for our community partners. 

Read the case stories below to learn more about how Community Connections can help you recruit skilled volunteers with the right skills and expertise to accelerate your organization’s growth and impact!

• Soap Cycling, Asia’s first and largest youth-led soap recycling charity, continues to benefit from the advice and support of its Marketing Advisor, Nick Shao-Wilson, who is also Marketing Director at Tatler Asia. Read more here.
• Wedu, a Singapore-based organization committed to empowering women changemakers around the world, launched an important with legal support from Sandy Lin, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP. Read more here. 
• PathFinders, serving migrant mothers and their children in Hong Kong, benefited from the risk management framework built out by Carl Fernando, a risk management professional at Macquarie. Read more here.  
• Third Sector Connect, a social enterprise that helps social impact organizations build capacity, enhanced its work processes with the help of Monica Cai, Controller, Cost Management & Analytics, Nomura, and Michael Fung, Senior Accountant, PwC Hong Kong. Read more here. 

Interested in joining Community Connections and gaining access to our pool of high-calibre skilled volunteers as well as a rich library of resources? Fill out this registration form or get in touch with us at communityconnections@shared-impact.com!

The post How Skilled Volunteers Can Help Your Organization Build Capacity appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

He is also a Skilled Volunteer of our Community Connections Program, who went to great lengths to help our Community Partner, PathFinders, create a risk management framework.

“Carl was invested from the beginning, and willing to go the extra mile,” said Harriet Beavis, Director of Fundraising at PathFinders. “He didn’t wait for us to tell him the next steps. He did the legwork and made recommendations or chased us for an answer – this was key to his success. He was very proactive in sharing his skills and what he could support us with.”

After meeting Harriet at a Connection Session, Carl took the lead to manage a thorough organization-wide risk review for PathFinders. He also spent a day at PathFinders’s community center to learn more about the organization’s work and operations and to meet key staff. He then organized a series of conversations with different team and board members, until a scope of suitable work around risk management was developed for him to drive forward.

Time commitment is an issue for corporate professionals like Carl, but he managed to find a way to make it work, and his skills-based volunteering partnership with PathFinders proved to be rewarding. 

Carl is not alone in finding value in skills-based volunteering. 

Monica Cai, Controller, Cost Management & Analytics at Nomura, and Michael Fung, Senior Accountant at PwC Hong Kong, found a great sense of achievement from their partnership with Third Sector Connect, another of our Community Partners. 

The benefits of volunteering are plenty, from improving mental health and employee morale to developing empathy and career advancement.

So, how does one start? 

When working with the Skilled Volunteers of Community Connections, we often came across high-calibre professionals who didn’t know how they could contribute to our Community Partners. 

What they didn’t know is that their skills and expertise in legal, accounting, finance, PR and communications etc. are already invaluable to social impact organizations who often don’t have the budget for these headcounts.

To quote Monica, “Be open-minded. Really sit down and think about what you can offer. There is actually a lot you can offer to help social enterprises in their daily work.”

It is important that you, as a volunteer, first get a thorough understanding of the organization. Like Carl, you can visit the organization’s office and meet the key staff in person. Or you can schedule an online call with them to learn more about their daily operations, beneficiaries, and pain points. 

Once you have a better grasp of the organization’s needs, you can then identify the areas where your expertise and skill-sets can provide the most value. 

Depending on your schedule and desired level of commitment, you may want to start with a short-term project first, and then extend your commitment to longer-term engagements, such as joining the organization’s board of advisors or directors. In fact, that’s how our three women directors came to join the FSI board!

Are you ready to join our community of Skilled Volunteers to contribute your skills and expertise for positive social impact? Get in touch with our Community Connections team at communityconnections@shared-impact.com

The post Benefits of Volunteering – Community Connections appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

So you would like to contribute your time and expertise to help social impact organizations working to tackle issues that you are passionate about. But how can you make the best out of the Connection Session to get to know more about the social impact organizations, so that you will know what kind of time commitment and skillsets you can offer? Read our interview with Amber Riley, a Skilled Volunteer of our Community Connections Program.

Why did you want to join Community Connections?
Community Connections was attractive to me because it facilitated an opportunity to find long-term and meaningful connections with social enterprises. I wanted to find an organization that I could contribute to by using my existing skills for a good cause. My husband is also happy to be involved by putting to use his IT skills so it is a project we could do together. Also, I saw joining Community Connections as an opportunity to also develop my own personal skills and expand into areas that I am not familiar with for example by potentially developing my business development and marketing/communication skills.

What motivated you to be prepared (including researching on the Community Partners, your elevator pitch, etc.) for the Connection Session?
We only had a limited time to connect initially with each Community Partner so I wanted to make sure I used that time as efficiently as possible by learning as much as I could about each Community Partner prior to the session. Researching about the Community Partners in advance presented a good opportunity for me to think about why I wanted to be involved, and what I thought I could contribute to the Community Partners so I could articulate this at the first meeting.

How did you prepare for the Connection Session?
I researched each of the Community Partners through their websites including what their focus was and how developed it looked like they were. I gave thought to which Community Partners interested me the most but also which ones I felt that I could bring the most to and assist with my existing skill-set.  I also gave some thought to my skills and what I could offer to the SIPs and also what experience I had with each of the focus points of the individual Community Partners so that I could connect best with them.

How long did it take you to prepare for the Connection Session?
It really didn’t take that long and it was a really enjoyable experience finding out about each of the Community Partners. I would estimate I probably spent about two hours doing some background reading and it was very much worth it.

Community Connections connects skilled corporate professionals with social impact organizations tackling some of the biggest problems in the world. Corporate employees will have the chance to utilize their potential and develop more skills while working for a good cause.

Would your company be interested in joining Community Connections? Get in touch with us on communityconnections@shared-impact.com

The post A Skilled Volunteer’s Advice on Making the Best Out of the Connection Session appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

We kicked off our Singapore Community Connections Program 2021 with a great Connection Session on 22 June!

Our heartfelt gratitude goes to our Social Impact Partners, representing Art for Good, Here with You Helpline, iC2 Prep House, Soap Cycling Singapore, Tea Ideas, and The Ecostatement, and the Corporate Participants from Credit Suisse, Macquarie, and Nomura, for spending their lunch hour on meaningful conversations to drive positive social impact.

To the Social Impact Partners who applied the learnings from the training session at the Connection Session, we are immensely proud of you! And to the Corporate Participants who asked questions related to long-term skills-based volunteering opportunities, our best wishes for crafting your social impact journey ahead!

Are you a social impact organization looking for skills-based volunteers? Or are you looking for impact-driven volunteering opportunities for your company’s employees? Learn more about Community Connections here or get in touch with us on communityconnections@shared-impact.com if you would like to join upcoming Connection Sessions!

Our Library of Useful Resources

As the Social Impact Partner of our Community Connections Program, you will not only get to connect with the Corporate Participants, but you will also get access to the rich library of useful resources we have curated on our Notion Page, covering a wide range of topics to help you prepare for the Connection Session, start your board governance learning journey, craft your fundraising strategy, and design your impact assessment and measurement framework.

We are constantly updating our Notion Page with new and useful resources, so let us know the type of information you would like to be added!

Find out from our past Social Impact Partner and Corporate Participant how they benefited from our Notion Page of resources here.

The post Community Connections Kicks Off in Singapore! appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Skilled Volunteer: Carl Fernando, Risk Management Group, Macquarie

Commencement of Partnership/Collaboration: November 2020

Location: Hong Kong

Problem Statement

Founded in 2007, PathFinders is a well-recognized Hong Kong-registered charity with a mission to ensure the most vulnerable and unsupported children in Hong Kong are protected and respected, and their Migrant Domestic Worker (MDW) mothers are empowered to find a path to a brighter future. 

Into its 13th year of operation, PathFinders was experiencing the growing pains of an organization of its age and size. With limited headcount, capacity, and skills amongst the team, PathFinders needed to bring external experts to help it work through some of the more complex aspects of corporate governance, such as risk management.

Risk management has always been the remit of PathFinders’ senior leadership team. Over past years, it has become increasingly important as the organization has evolved its strategies, programming, and budget, making it more important to assess any changes or new risks that may have arisen. The evolving and unstable external environment was yet another impetus to create a robust risk management framework. 

Following their initial contact at the Connection Session, Harriet Beavis, Director Fundraising of PathFinders, and Carl Fernando, Risk Management Group, Macquarie, began a partnership in which Carl helped the organization create a risk management framework. 

Carl was invested from the beginning, and willing to go the extra mile. He didn’t wait for us to tell him the next steps. He did the legwork and made recommendations or chased us for an answer – this was key to his success.

FSI’s Shared Impact Solution: Community Connections

The PathFinders Partnership

PathFinders was one of the social impact organizations that benefited from the connections with skills-based volunteers, at a time when a robust risk management framework was much needed to bolster organizational governance. 

“Although there are other skills-based volunteer platforms out there, we have struggled in the past to identify committed and skilled individuals,” said Harriet Beavis, Director of Fundraising at PathFinders. 

Harriet’s reason to join Community Connections’s Connection Program was to meet and identify high-calibre volunteers whose skills and passions align with PathFinders’ work and needs. In just an hour, Harriet was able to connect with eight Skilled Volunteers, and she has since been in touch with four who were interested in supporting the organization’s work. 

Among the four Skilled Volunteers was Carl Fernando, an Enterprise Risk, Compliance and Governance professional from Macquarie with 15 years of experience in the field, and a graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. “Carl was invested from the beginning, and willing to go the extra mile,” said Harriet. “He didn’t wait for us to tell him the next steps. He did the legwork and made recommendations or chased us for an answer – this was key to his success. He was very proactive in sharing his skills and what he could support us with, which made it easy to direct his offer to my colleagues and to my board, who were interested to learn more about his background and offer to support on various aspects of board governance.”

From PathFinders, I’m obtaining the education, experience, and opportunity that comes from working with an incredible organization looking to support and enrich the lives of expectant mothers and their children, that are some of the most under-represented and vulnerable in our society.

Since the Connection Session, Carl has taken the lead to manage a thorough organization-wide risk review for PathFinders. He organized a series of conversations with different team and board members until a scope of suitable work around risk management was developed for him to drive forward. Carl was also generous with his time, and spent a day at PathFinders’ community centre to “onboard” himself, observe, and learn more about the organization’s work and operations, as well as to meet key staff to kick-start the risk management project.

And PathFinders isn’t the only beneficiary in this partnership. “I’ve benefited immensely,” said Carl. “From PathFinders, I’m obtaining the education, experience, and opportunity that comes from working with an incredible organization looking to support and enrich the lives of expectant mothers and their children, that are some of the most under-represented and vulnerable in our society.”

In addition to being articulate about his skills and expertise, Carl was eloquent when presenting his risk management framework and project plan to PathFinders’ extended leadership team to ensure their understanding of the project and their respective involvement. For example, Carl has led numerous workshops covering all aspects of PathFinders’ work and engaging all team members, so as to give employees a platform to voice any concerns. He presented the topic of risk management at a PathFinders board meeting, sharing with the board members what they could expect from the risk review project.

Carl has worked closely with PathFinders’s leadership team to finalize their first-ever risk register – a compilation and classification of all organizational risks – to help them identify the biggest risks and prioritize and develop treatment plans. 

Looking back, Carl found the Connection Session a great experience. “The exposure and introduction that Community Connections provided by bringing together NGOs that were able to articulate their mission and needs really expedited what might have been months’ worth of research for me. I love that the various organizations could be very clear on what they needed and also give participants a flavor for who they are, what they do, and the mission they exist for. It really is a wonderful session.”

The post How a Macquarie Professional Helps PathFinders Build a Risk Management Framework appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Skilled Volunteer: Harrison Tsoi, banking lawyer at Clifford Chance

Location: Hong Kong

Problem Statement

Box of Hope is a Hong Kong-registered charity, founded in 2008 with the aim of teaching Hong Kong school children the joy and importance of giving, while giving a child in poverty the chance to experience the joy of receiving a gift. 

Every year, Box of Hope collects over 30,000 boxes of practical items, educational gifts and toys, packed by Hong Kong’s school children. The boxes are sorted by volunteers and distributed via its charity partners to children in need in Hong Kong and other places across Asia. 

Entirely run by volunteers, Box of Hope has been going through big changes and growth since 2020. To professionalise its services, it needed a board of directors. While there was some success in recruiting directors from its own network, Box of Hope also wanted to explore a wider catchment to find younger people and people of different interests and skills to join its board, to cover the many aspects of running a charity. 

FSI’s Shared Impact Solution: Community Connections

The Box of Hope Partnership

Sian Taylor, Director of Box of Hope, a Community Partner, and Harrison Tsoi, a Skilled Volunteer from Clifford Chance, met at a Connection Session. With the combination of Community Connections’s library of resources and training session, Sian was able to identify her organization’s needs and the roles it needed to fill. “I went through the Notions page created by Community Connections. There is a lot of useful information about the types of roles that each of the board of directors will play. Because I have never done this before, I find this information very useful and interesting,” said Sian.

At the Connection Session, Sian was able to meet a pool of subject matter experts from multinational corporates, who had a basic understanding of its history and operations, and were interested in empowering social impact organizations with their skills and expertise.

This is especially true for Harrison Tsoi. As Clifford Chance was one of Box of Hope’s corporate partners in its annual box collection, Harrison was familiar with the social impact organization before joining Community Connections. And the information provided by Community Connections on the Community Partners was helpful, too. “I went through the Community Connections website. There are lots of resources and useful information, such as the expected responsibilities of a director in a charity. I also read the websites of different charities to try to know how I can help,” said Harrison.

Soon after the Connection Session, Harrison contacted Sian via email to discuss the possibilities of a partnership, and a coffee meeting later, Harrison became a member of Box of Hope’s newly created board of directors. “I am sort of taking the legal aspect of Harrison for granted, as he is a lawyer,” said Sian. “But I was also very impressed with his enthusiasm, and his youth, bringing a younger look to everything. I think there is a lot more to running a charity than just the legal aspect or the accounting aspect; it’s communicating with the community.”

Although not all Connection Sessions would result in successful partnerships, Community Connections has enabled almost 200 Skilled Volunteers to be paired up with around 100 Community Partners since its founding in 2015. And some partnerships are fruitful and long-term. “I’m still new to the charity space and I’m happy to assist in any aspects that Box of Hope, or Sian, would like me to assist in,” said Harrison. “Hopefully, with my legal background, I will be able to provide legal advice wherever needed.” 

The post Why this Clifford Chance Professional Joined Box of Hope as a Director appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

We would like to thank Carbonbase, Education for Good, HELP for Domestic Workers, International Care Ministries, Oxfam Hong Kong, Sons & Daughters, and Women in Sports Empowered Hong Kong for sharing the good work you do.

Likewise, big thanks to the Corporate Participants from Clifford Chance Asia Pacific, Credit Suisse, Macquarie Group, Nomura, and PwC Mainland China and Hong Kong, who came well-prepared to connect with our Social Impact Partners.

We hope you all had fruitful and engaging conversations in the Breakout Sessions. We at FSI, also one of the SIPs, certainly did, and we met many great CPs that we would like to work with.

Got questions about scoping opportunities and leveraging the skills and expertise of CPs? Wondering what level of engagement to commit to when helping an SIP? Get in touch with us!  

The post Community Connections’s First 2021 Connection Session! appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.

Instead of having corporate volunteers help to make mooncakes, Toomey wanted HandsOn Hong Kong to be able to offer volunteer services at a higher level, such as skills-based programs, through which volunteers can apply their skills and expertise to professionalize the social impact space. “The long-term goal would be that there’s less of a need for an organization like HandsOn Hong Kong, because there would be a greater awareness, and a greater connection between people and the community that they can support.”

What are the Benefits of Skills-based Volunteering? 

For social impact organizations, one of the greatest benefits of skills-based volunteering are the knowledge, skills, and expertise of subject matter experts whom they would otherwise not have the connection to, or the budget to hire. The outcome can often be capacity building and organizational growth through the transfer of skills and knowledge on anything from financial sustainability and fundraising effectiveness, marketing and communications, IT development to risk management.

But social impact organizations aren’t the only beneficiaries. Some call skills-based volunteering “the new executive training ground” for the leadership training opportunities it provides to corporate employees. Increasingly, people are realizing the important need of diverse experiences when advancing their career, and such experiences can only be gained from meaningful engagements outside of the workplace – our world is changing so fast that management schools, corporate learning departments, and executive education programs are struggling to keep their training and curriculum relevant.

As my mom always told me, the best way to learn is through OPE: other people’s experiences.

In their survey of 122 senior executives from various industries, Ken Banta, founder of the Vanguard Network, and Orlan Boston, a partner in the Ernst & Young LLP Global Health Sciences practice, found that all senior executives agreed that external engagements were critical to success today and in the future, and more than 100 said that external engagements were considered when they were assessing candidates for succession planning.

Volunteering your skills to create measurable impact, it turns out, can not only help you build knowledge, skills, and confidence, which you can bring back to your own organization. Carving out time for these meaningful engagements can also help prevent burnout, according to serial entrepreneur Keith Krach, who helped create and remains a mentor at a leadership training program for the Sigma Chi fraternity at Purdue University: “Every time I take a week to go facilitate the program for these kids, my batteries are recharged. I get inspired. It makes me think thoughts I never would have had otherwise. It broadens my scope of empathy and understanding. As my mom always told me, the best way to learn is through OPE: other people’s experiences.”

Talk to us!

With its collaborative nature, FSI’s Community Connections Program encapsulates our “Shared-Impact Model”, which promotes broad collaboration, free sharing of knowledge and resources, adoption of data-driven impact models, and seeking systems change.

How? By connecting corporate employees with social impact organizations seeking directors, committee members, and skills-based volunteers. If you’re interested in learning more about how our Shared-Impact Model can help social impact organizations thrive in the post-virus world, read our article published in the latest issue of Jumpstart Magazine.

Are you a social impact organization seeking skills-based volunteers of various levels of engagement? Learn more about our Community Connections Program, or talk to us if you would like to join our upcoming Connection Sessions!

The post Volunteering for Shared Impact (Part II) appeared first on Foundation for Shared Impact.