With an aim to promote and facilitate literacy in the under privileged strata of society, ARCH planned a skill-based volunteering initiative where employees of a technology and infrastructure development based company participate every year in school kit donation drive.

At ARCH we promoted SBV amongst these employees in an engaging and interesting way.

We first identified their skills, areas of volunteering interest, time availability and then assigned their respective roles and responsibilities in the project.

We then shortlisted the beneficiary schools within the set parameters laid by us. The company volunteers are a part of this screening process.

Thereafter, we engaged in sensitising the employees towards this project and encouraged them to donate money towards the school kits. This was done by setting up an interactive donation kiosk at the office premises.

From the money collection we sourced and purchased good quality school kits including a school bag and stationary items. The employee volunteers packed the school kit, with books and stationary together into school bags.

Finally, on the designated day we organised the distribution of these school kits where the company volunteers personally interacted and handed over the kits to the underprivileged students of Government aided schools.

While all jobs were exclusively executed by company volunteers ARCH was the bridge between making this idea fruitful. All the planning, co-ordination and facilitation was meticulously handled by us!

In the current scenario of global competition, soft skills are fast becoming an indicator of development and growth in people. In spite of literacy being available to the differently-abled community belonging to the lower strata of the society it does not guarantee their professional success.

To enhance their opportunity to do well at work ‘soft skills training’ has been identified as the key factor. ARCH provides professional grooming and training in areas such as communication skills, e-mail etiquette, telephone etiquette, listening skills, team building and personal grooming to name a few.

ARCH works closely with corporates engaging in SBV to impart soft skill training to the needy. While the volunteers have to only conduct sessions, we take care of all the planning, participant registration, module building, co-ordination, venue management and post workshop activities.

We also conduct a sensitization workshop with employee volunteers to deal with the mind-set and challenges of training differently-abled participants.

Such an initiative helps the volunteers to tailor their program to suit the temperament of the special participants and make them more receptive to the module. Further, it evokes a sense of satisfaction amongst the employee volunteers to take up a worthy cause in the future as well.

Sometimes, in spite of having the best intentions at heart, employees are unable to devote time to volunteering. There are certain company policies that disallow employees to step out of office during working hours and most often employees are unable to take time out of their busy schedules.  In such a situation ARCH creates interesting In-office volunteering opportunities to engage employees in volunteering so that everyone contributes to the company’s CSR goals and in turn to the culture of giving back to the society.

The In-office volunteering proposition is highly customised depending upon the company policy, level of employee involvement, availability and interest.This gives us the perfect opportunity to develop and design interesting and innovative initiatives that can be implemented within the four walls of a corporate office.

Some of our successful programs organized so far are-

1)    One day With Us – The employees of E-Tech Company open their doors and hearts to the handicapped and specially-abled community for one day to give a slice of life in the corporate world. Most skill building programs limit the exposure of their specially-abled participants to bookish training and classroom learning. ARCH works differently. We create a platform where our participants get to experience first-hand, the day to day working of an organization. Such visits stimulate learning. Employee volunteers engage participants by taking them through the whole organizational structure. They showcase the functioning of different departments, explain the work culture, reflect company expectations and define the processes at work. This interaction helps employees to motivate the specially-abled participants in chartering the future course of their life successfully. It also makes them empathetic to the cause of social equality.

2)   Training Workshops – Corporates encourage their employees to take up training in various aspects like self-grooming, etiquettes, business communication and time management in the office premises during office hours. ARCH has organized various such workshops with specially-abled and needy participants visiting corporate offices for meaningful skill building. We have conducted several trainings involving employees of Paul Meson Consulting, a BPO & Larsen &Tubro.

3)    Module Designing – ARCH uses the expertise of volunteer employees working in various departments of different firms to create training modules for science quizzes and soft skill workshops. We also engage employee volunteers in making worksheets and learning modules for different art and communication related projects that we undertake in government run and aided schools. Employees are more than happy to research and reach out to the needy by sparing time and expertise as per their convenience in a field of their interest.