Winners of the Tata Volunteering Week Awards felicitated at the Tata Volcon 2020

The Tata Sustainability Group (TSG) held the Tata group’s volunteering conference — Tata Volcon — on February 17, 2020, in the ballroom of the Taj Mahal Palace. The conference brought together senior leaders, volunteers and the Tata Engage volunteering SPOC (specific point of contact) community.

Vikas Koul, a disaster response volunteer from Tata Power, sharing his experience

The Tata Engage SPOC community are a cadre of self-driven employees of the Tata group who support the group-wide volunteering programme Tata Engage. The community has over 600 SPOCs from across geographies, who actively promote a culture of volunteering within their organisations by disseminating communication campaigns, curating volunteering opportunities and enhancing the volunteering performance of their respective companies.

The VOLCON saw over 100 participants from various companies, several of whom were winners of the coveted Tata Volunteering Week Awards for editions 11 (March 2019) and 12 (September 2019).

The event was kicked off with a welcome address by the group CSO, Siddharth Sharma, who stressed on the importance of corporate volunteering and encouraging all Tata employees to contribute at least half a day (4 hours) annually on volunteering through Tata Engage or their own company’s corporate volunteering programme.

This was followed by a showcase of good practices in the corporate volunteering space from leading Tata companies, including Trent and Tata Power Delhi Distribution. The VOLCON had also invited two star volunteers who shared their varied experiences. Coomie Kapadia from Rallis India, a serial ProEngager, shared her experience of working on seven ProEngage projects (skill-based, weekend volunteering projects offered by TSG under the ProEngage format of Tata Engage) and Vikas Koul from Tata Power shared his experience of volunteering in the aftermath of a disaster, as a core volunteer in the Jammu & Kashmir Floods Response, and subsequently as a TSG-trained project manager in the Kerala and Karnataka Floods Response.

Chacko Thomas, MD and CEO, Tata Coffee; Siddharth Sharma, group CSO; Praveer Sinha, MD and CEO, Tata Power; and Amit Sharma, MD and CEO, Tata Consulting Engineers, sharing their perspectives on corporate volunteering

In the last session before the felicitation of the award winners, Chacko Thomas, MD and CEO, Tata Coffee; Amit Sharma, MD and CEO, Tata Consulting Engineers; Praveer Sinha, MD and CEO, Tata Power, shared their perspectives on employee volunteering as part of the panel, with the group CSO acting as the moderator.

The highlight of the VOLCON was the awards ceremony, with senior leaders of the group including S Padmanabhan, executive chairman, Tata Business Excellence Group, and Sanjiv Lal, MD and CEO, Rallis India, felicitating the proud winners of the Tata Volunteering Week Awards.

For more highlights from Tata VOLCON’s discussions, visit the Tata Volcon–February 17, 2020, photo album on the Tata Engage Facebook page.

For the list of winners, please click on the links below:

Winners of TVW11 (March 2019)

Winners of TVW12 (September 2019)