In an exclusive conversation with the India CSR; Shaina Ganapathy, Head of Community Outreach, Embassy Group, a leading Real Estate company, highlights company CSR philosophy, culture and recent innovations. Following are the excerpts of the interaction:
What are the focus areas for Embassy Group in CSR?
Under the CSR mandate, Embassy nurtures and contributes to the economic, social and environmental development of the communities in which we operate.
Our vision is to build a sustainable ecosystem by focusing on uplifting Government Schools, enhancing the areas around us through our Sustainable Infrastructure projects, and finally – partnering for change to address common challenges.
Health and Education: Our aim is to facilitate students of Government Schools with a safe learning environment through holistic interventions in Education, Health, and Infrastructure.
Sustainable infrastructure: We have been working towards driving a positive change by providing infrastructure-based solutions with new frontline services for environmental sustainability and community healthcare.
Community Engagement: We believe in championing initiatives through collaborative projects that engage corporate clients, employees, residents, the government and external stakeholders for community development.
The last year and this one has continued to be unprecedented in many years – the uphill battle of Covid-19 we continue to face has thrown into sharp relief the existing inequities and gaps entrenched in society. We will also continue to focus on relief efforts that will strengthen our healthcare system, ease the burden of our frontline workers and support our underprivileged communities who have faced enormous disruptions and incalculable challenges to their livelihoods.
What were the initiatives undertaken by Embassy Group during the Covid-19 pandemic?
At the very core of Embassy Group’s ethos is support for our communities. Consistent with those beliefs, we undertook various initiatives during this trying period across the country to mitigate the damaging impacts of Covid-19.
Throughout the pandemic, we have worked to aid those disproportionately affected by the virus – the poor, the marginalised, our migrant workers, daily wage earners, and our frontline and healthcare workers. At the forefront of containing the pandemic, we set up 11 hydration stations across the country in their city-based offices, where police personnel could receive drinking water, snacks, coffee and tea, access to first aid, sanitisers and toilets during the lockdowns. We provided over 50,000 hand sanitizers, 1.5 lakh protective masks, and nutritional snacks to police forces across the nation. We also supported healthcare workers in Covid Centres with the provision of PPE.
During the first and second waves of the pandemic, we provided over 9 lakh meals through the distribution of ration kits and cooked meals to underprivileged populations in Bangalore, and across Karnataka and Maharashtra.
In addition to our own initiatives, we led a consortium of our Office Park occupiers to support the Department of Education and Government School students. We stepped in to ensure the health and safety of the around 9 lakh students, invigilators and evaluators attending both the last years and this year’s Karnataka SSLC examinations.
The joint initiative saw the provision of sanitizers for every day of the exams and evaluations. Our additional interventions to support the Department of Education included donating a recording studio to supplement online learning initiatives for 41 lakh students in Karnataka, as well as providing face shields for 59,887 teachers and temperature monitors for 9,347 Government High and Primary Schools in the state.
Once the second wave hit, creating a crisis that overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure and healthcare infrastructure, we formed another consortium of corporate partners to respond to the Chief Minister of Karnataka’s appeal for corporates to join hands in the battle against Covid-19. Together with our partners, we donated much-needed 95 ICU and high-dependency beds, and medical equipment across 3 Government Hospitals.
With a potential third wave of the pandemic in the horizon, we will also bolster paediatric ICU facilities and continue to activate efforts to supply life-saving medical equipment.
Some insights into how companies can plan CSR strategy for the ‘New Normal’?
The sudden onset of Covid-19 has impacted how we see the world, how we conduct business and how we go about our lives. With CSR coming to the forefront, there was an outpouring of relief efforts from the private sector at the start of the pandemic.
Now that we’re at a year later and find ourselves in nearly the same situation, our focus should be on creating a strategy, for now, we can successfully navigate the emergency we’re still in, but also plan for a post-crisis period.
Imperative to this strategy is striking a balance between supporting continuous healthcare requirements, in the aftermath of our terrifying second wave, as well as focusing on our traditional focus areas. The pandemic has had the harmful effect of leaving long-term developmental projects without funds and stopped short before their completion. It is more vital than ever before that companies provide their NGO partners the space to adapt to this new and unfamiliar way of operating without scaling back on their funding completely.
Collaboration is also key. We long recognised the challenge of promoting social change as being beyond the scope of a single organisation. This became even more apparent during the pandemic period, underscoring our belief that ‘Together we can do more.’ While we navigate this ‘New Normal,’ partnering with other corporates should become a cornerstone.
Finally, with the present disaster throwing economic and social inequalities into sharp relief, CSR policies should advocate and enable sustainable development for our nation and the world at large. Contributions towards sustainable infrastructure including the healthcare framework, food supply chains and livelihood support stimulate stronger development.
Why, according to you, is collaboration so vital in the CSR space?
We believe that collaboration is the path forward to closing gaps and creating long-term, sustainable change. By working together to achieve progress on large issues such as this, companies can help our government and its citizens through our CSR initiatives reach the scale and impact required to lift millions of Indians and people around the world out of poverty. Different companies bring different sets of expertise to the table – when our resources are combined, we can achieve much more than can be done alone.
Describe what makes Embassy’s Corporate Connect program so unique and elaborate on how it contributes to effective community development?
In 2017, we created our Corporate Connect Program, which aims to bring together the 200 corporate occupiers of our business parks with a shared vision for our communities. To date, we have partnered with 34 Corporates for 63 projects in the spaces of educational infrastructure, public infrastructure, health and Covid-19 relief, touching over 2 million lives. With our partners, we have collectively contributed over Rs. 40 crores towards the social and economic development of our nation.
In the last year, we are glad to have been able to identify multiple common mandates for collaboration with our corporate partners leading to the implementation of sustainable CSR programs. When small and localised efforts are made by companies to address complex and larger issues and challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic, resources are split, and it becomes difficult to scale.
There are numerous benefits in partnering, the primary being, of course, the extension of reach and impact. Further, there is less of a chance of wasting resources with companies bringing greater efficiency to the table and learning from each other’s mistakes. Businesses focus on a better social return on their investments. There is greater encouragement of innovation, the creation and bedding down of successful and replicable models and finally, harnessing the various strengths and skill sets that each company boasts.
In Embassy’s experience during the Covid-19 pandemic and before, how should corporates align with the Government’s mandate?
We have found that over the years, corporates working in isolation of Government departments and agencies have proven to be less effective. We find that alignment with the Government maximises value for underprivileged communities and the environment, avoiding duplication of efforts. In many cases, the Government already has existing networks, infrastructure and has carried out needs-based assessments on the ground. Utilising their expertise ensures greater efficiency.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, there were overwhelming disruptions in communities across the country and without the support of the Government, companies would be investing a great deal of time in identifying and selecting beneficiaries. We worked very closely with the Health Departments across the various states in which we worked to activate our relief efforts, which ensured that our initiatives were channeled to the right places.
Government schools and students suffered exponentially during the pandemic, how was Embassy able to support them during this time?
While learning has been disrupted for most of the world’s children, this interruption will be egregious for children from low-income backgrounds. The Covid-19 school closures will not simply be a short bump in the road for them, but an end to their learning and their dreams of creating a positive change in their communities.
In addition to the support, we provided the Department of Education in Karnataka, we also sought to support them during this challenging period by ensuring all their focus could be put in school (supplemented through online activities conducted by our NGO partner, Colours of Life). Through providing them and their families with everything they may need during this challenging period, we attempted to ease the immense challenges that would have otherwise faced the parents of our students. This included the provision of rations throughout the year, health kits and efforts to ensure that schools were kept safe and sanitary.
Laying the basis for a generation of students with improved lifelong resilience to disease, we have been championing preventative health awareness in Government Schools since 2016 with our corporate partner, Cerner. We provided over 30,000 health kits to students in Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune, Noida and Hosur. Throughout the pandemic, we continued to provide maintenance to our adopted Government Schools in Bangalore on a weekly basis. In preparation for schools opening briefly in January of this year, we conducted deep cleaning and sanitization. We furnished the schools with sanitizer foot stands and enough sanitizer for daily usage.
Finally, we aimed to preserve the health and safety of teachers, who are also at risk of contracting the disease, by donating face shields across 126 Government Schools in Bangalore. We also distributed face shields and temperature monitors to all 9,347 Government High and Primary Schools in the state.
As we prepare for a third wave, what initiatives can corporates, the Government and NGOs align on to ensure we are able to mitigate the ill effects of the pandemic?
After the devastating second wave and with the potential of a third one, vaccination of our communities has become critical in the face of the hundreds of thousands of deaths from Covid-19.
Where corporates and NGOs can augment the Government’s efforts in this herculean undertaking is accelerating the fast-tracking of the distribution of vaccines, creating awareness on the importance of complete inoculation and addressing barriers to access.
(India CSR/August 23, 2021)