Impact Stories
Vokkarane Seva Trust
M.V. Varadarajan, Project Coordinator
Vokkarane Seva Trust(R) was established in 2013 and is headed by M.V. Varadarajan, located in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The founder and president is a former Mechanical Engineering Graduate who previously headed the Operations team in a Multinational Company. They aim at promoting sustainable alternate sources of energy by spreading awareness on pollution. They conduct workshops to promote communication skills, life skills and other managerial skills. They also arrange health camps in rural areas. They are working toward setting up old age homes and senior citizen day care centers.
Smrity Bhawna
Customer Success Manager, Tata Communications
This was already a second volunteering project that Smrity has chosen as part of ProEngage program. Her daily job involves a lot of communication and building training modules is one of her regular tasks.
The Story
Project Execution
Professional training is one of Vokkarane Seva Trust’s core activities. They specialize in providing professional training for different sectors, including government school teachers, so they can better manage stress and students. All the course materials that include around 30-40 presentations that the Trust uses are in-house made and the director Varadarajan wanted to revamp these materials into more professionally-looking powerpoint presentations.
Smrity could have chosen any of these topics to work on. Her first choice was a course on ‘motivation’, as this was her long-time interest. As she was connected with Varadarajan on WhatsApp, sharing any information was very easy. After each slide was created she asked for feedback from the NGO trainers. This way, she was finished with her presentation in a 1,5 month.
The NGO was very happy with the outcome and asked Smrity whether she would like to help them with one more presentation. As the project was originally planned for 3 months and Smrity enjoyed the work, she has decided to pick another topic, this time “self-development” topic. As Varadarajan declares, “The second presentation also came out very well. Smrity very well understood what we want. This helped a lot as our ground work is reduced. We use the ppts during our webinars - everything is ready, we just have to talk.”
Challenges faced
As Smrity recollects, “This is a success story for me. I didn’t find any single challenge, everything went so smooth. It was so easy to communicate with Chezuba and the NGO, constant communication and feedback taking. I've been part of CSR Platform activity for 7 years, but this is the success story.” She added that this project gave her much more confidence about making ppts, as she had to learn how to create animations and graphics which was new for her. “Now I can make any kind of ppt!” she smiles.
Varadarajan seconds Smrity’s words. “There was no challenge, it was easy flow.” I even felt that the COVID pandemic affected the project positively as the professionals had more free time to work on an online volunteering project.
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