Tharani Jegatheeswaran: Intrapraneurship, Career Changes and Social Impact Consulting at Deloitte

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Why does a Big Four accounting firm like Deloitte do social impact consulting? Is this for CSR purposes? is this for publicity because being involved in impact is 'cool'? Are there business reasons behind this decision and if so, what were they? Do they charge clients for the consulting they do or is this pro bono? In this episode we hear from Tharani how she made a successful career change into social impact and built Deloitte's social impact consultancy from nothing. 

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Sabeen Ali – Hackathons creating Social Impact & Technology for Good

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On the show today we have Sabeen Ali, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Angelhack - the world’s largest and most diverse hacker community. AngelHack, a female-owned, female-majority company helps drive open innovation of tech products, platforms and brands with extraordinary smarts, scale and speed via tech education, marketing and hackathons. Prior to AngelHack, Sabeen founded (and then sold) her own leadership training and organizational development company, Team Building ROI. She has also consulted for companies like Yahoo!, and Cisco. Sabeen is someone who i very much personally admire. I especially love how she is working to bridge the gap between the tech world and the social world, which have up until quite recently been very seperate. Even today, the social world can be very slow to adapt new technology, much to the sectors disadvantage. Sabeen is also someone who is very much a role model for getting more women in to technology and is also a champion of making this happen quicker. Angelhack is actually one of the case studies that I use quite often when people tell me that it is too difficult to have more women at a tech event or in their organisation. Anyway, I think it’s best we get in to the show so that Sabeen can tell you more about her work!

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Esther Nai – Corporate Social Responsibility & Sustainability at Salesforce

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I promise I've got a great episode for you today. I'm sure a lot of the listeners out there have heard about Salesforce and probably even use it. But I'm pretty sure your imagination would be quite limited in terms of the type of social impact initiatives that they work on that are in line with their business. Well today you're in for a treat. I interviewed Esther Nai, who heads up corporate responsibility and sustainability programmes across Asia for Salesforce about exactly that. I'm quite familiar with their work in creating social impact so I'm excited to share this with you too. We chat about their 1-1-1 model, some case studies on impact that they've created, how they measure impact and most interesting to me, how Salesforce aligns the social impact with their business model. Enjoy!

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Elijah Johnston – Fostering Social Innovation & Hackathons for Social Impact

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I am excited to introduce to you one of my very good friends and someone who I find extremely inspiring. In this episode, I interview Eli Johnston who does a lot of very interesting work bringing together corporations and entrepreneurs to accelerate social innovation. He does this through his work as the head of corporate innovation at the Impact Hub in Singapore which is a co-working space and community for social entrepreneurs. If that’s not enough, he is also the co-founder of Own Your Brilliance that brings students together from around the world and gives them to tools to get started on their journey to becoming social entrepreneurs. In this spare time, for the next 9 months Eli is also teaching a class of 10 women from all over South East Asia. They are house helpers also known as foreign domestic workers in Singapore. And he is going to be running a Venture Club through an organisation called Aidha which teaches financial literacy, business and entrepreneurship to these incredible hardworking women on their days off. Eli will be working with the women to build their business plans for a venture in their home countries and for the first time in Aidha’s history, these businesses will be designed as social enterprises. Honestly don’t know how he does this all! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this episode, it was definitely one of the more fun ones for me to record, especially as I find that Eli is someone who can be a lot of fun but also very deep in his thoughts and motivation to change the world. I’m keen to hear what your thoughts are after you’ve had a listen!

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