Sharek.org sparks cultural shift toward voluntarism

Most employee volunteer efforts are designed to encourage employees in an organization to donate their time and energy to a cause, either one of the employee’s own choosing or one the organization already supports. Sharek.org had a larger goal in mind with its program: to make employee voluntarism acceptable and desirable in Egypt, a country where such activities have never had a cultural foothold. 

Changing a culture is no easy task, and Sharek.org set lofty goals, not only to encourage voluntarism but also to create a system to match expertise in organizations with needs in the community. The effort launched with Egypt’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation attending a special ceremony as Sharek.org introduced more than 250 volunteer opportunities. 

A mere four months after the launch, the number of volunteer opportunities expanded to 350, more organizations got on board, and media added support by favorably reporting on the initiative. Some three-quarters of the capability-building requests from civil society organizations were matched with trained volunteers, and the organization is experiencing a quarterly increase of 5 percent in the number of volunteer opportunities the program offers. Particularly gratifying is the number of companies joining the program and providing volunteers from their ranks of employees who have not historically been active in CSR. 

For this ambitious and impressive program, we are pleased to present the honor for Best Employee Volunteer Program in PR Daily’s 2014 Corporate Social Responsibility Awards to Sharek.org’s Ramez Farag, Mona Arishi, Ayman Shehata, and Shereen Mady and P&G Egypt, PwC Egypt and IBM Egypt.