How Companies Can Solve Today’s Societal Challenges Through the Combined Power of Purpose, People and Technology

It is deeply gratifying for me to see Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) be recognized as one of America’s top 50 community-minded organizations by Points of Light’s Civic 50. Every morning, I wake up inspired to work for an organization that believes that an enterprise’s true purpose is to serve the community and improve the quality of life. That was our founder’s mission when he started the Tata group 150 years ago, and we are proud that these same values continue to be practiced today at TCS, by our executive leaders and our 387,000 employees here in America and around the world.

In the realm of purpose driven organizations, the Tata group holds a special place; 66% of its holding company Tata Sons’ equity is held with public philanthropic trusts. Ergo, as Tata Sons holds approximately 74% of TCS’ shares, for every dollar that we create in dividends, almost 50% is invested back to improving societal outcomes through these trusts.

That is a truly empowering business model, especially in today’s world where employees want to work for purpose-driven organizations that focus on the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit.

As a company serving more than 500 U.S. businesses, including many of the Fortune 500 companies and the world’ leading brands, we thrive on using our contextual knowledge of industries and our technology innovation to create digital solutions that improve business outcomes for our clients and their end customers. We believe that companies have a moral and civic responsibility to society, as it is our primary stakeholder.

We fulfill that responsibility and address today’s societal challenges through the combined power of purpose, people, and technology.

Driven by our mantra of ‘Impact through Empowerment’, TCS has prioritized its corporate social responsibility efforts under the three thematic areas of health, education and planet. We identify the most pressing national challenges, leveraging our intellectual, technological, and human capital to supplement financial philanthropic investments in support of solutions that are innovative, collaborative, scalable and sustainable. By engaging and nurturing civic leadership among our employee CSR champions, we create agents of social change who then empower beneficiaries through their leadership and grassroots level work. In the past year alone, more than 40% of TCS employees volunteered to support their local communities in 112 cities across the U.S. and Canada.

Recognizing that technology is a key driver for social change, we have provided our pro-bono technology services and solutions to over 50 non-profit organizations, resulting in over $12 MM in social good. TCS has been a leading STEM and Computer Science education proponent for the past decade, through highly scalable cross-sector initiatives such as US2020, Million Women Mentors (MWM) and national partnerships with STEMConnector®, Npower, CSForAll and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. While building a broad-based, collaborative, cross-sector effort that reaches over two million children in America; we have also built a national technology infrastructure to enable mentoring of girls, young women and students from underrepresented and under-served communities.

TCS’ flagship student engagement program, goIT, has engaged more than 13,000 middle and high school students across 54 cities in the United States and Canada with hands-on experiences in computer science, to inspire them towards tech careers in ALL sectors. Launched in March 2017, Ignite My Future in School will engage 20,000 teachers and more than one million students over the next five years to prepare them for 21st century careers across all sectors. In partnership with Discovery Education, Ignite My Future in School will enable educators, administrators and school districts to become ambassadors of a trans-disciplinary approach and introduce computational thinking within the context of core subjects such as English, mathematics, social studies, science, and the arts.

Congratulations to all the 2017 Civic 50 organizations, each of whom demonstrate the value of doing well by doing good.