Deloitte to touch 250,000 lives through 'Impact Day'

As part of its corporate social responsibility initiative ‘Impact Day’, advisory professional service organisation Deloitte is planning to help kids in juvenile homes (or juvenile detention centres) build their careers and understand the outside world through its Out Reach thread (as they call their community services).

“The Out Reach thread is basically focused on orphanages as well as juvenile homes. We plan to engage with them through a lot of conversations and visuals centered around the outside world, and make sure that they are ready to take on the world beyond barriers,” Rajnikanth Ivaturi (corporate responsibility), Deloitte Consulting India Private Limited, told Business Standard.

 

Globally, Deloitte celebrates its Impact Day on the first Friday of June, the start of its financial year.

This year, however, while the company’s US headquarters continued to organise the CSR activity in June, its Indian arm switched the event to November owing to general weather conditions across major cities in the country during this month.

“Our biggest focus this year is on education. Considering the fact that 100 million Indians are projected to join the workforce in less than a decade, what we owe to the communities, specifically to the girl child, is to provide education,” said Hari Kumar, a principal in Deloitte LLP, who also manages the Indian operations of Deloitte US.

Impact Day is a one-day celebration of Deloitte’s year-round commitment to helping local communities through skills-based volunteerism.

The company, which employs 200,000 globally, including 20,000 in India, will visit around 80 schools and 50 colleges across Hyderabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad on its CSR day.

“Given the backdrop of various scandals and controversies that are taking place in India, one of the threads that we are introducing in the country is on ethical decision-making. The thread is all about making sure that we enshrine in our kids at the school level the concept of ethics,” Kumar said.

“The Impact day in India started with 600 professionals in 2003, touching 5,000 people. This year, more than 17,000 professional across cities would devote their time and energies to impact more than 240,000 people with their services. Of these, 40 per cent is what we are expecting to touch through our education threads,” he added.