Cart Impacting the lives of underprivileged children
04/13
TI employee Kumar Parthasarathy is making a difference in the lives of children in the U.S. and India through volunteerism.
For more than 10 years, TI employee Kumar Parthasarathy has been making a difference in the lives of children in the U.S. and India by serving as a volunteer with "Vibha-Help Them Grow." This nonprofit's vision is to ensure that every underprivileged child attains his or her right to education, health and opportunity.
Kumar, who works at TI in Dallas, began his journey with Vibha as an event volunteer in 2003. In this role, he took charge of fundraising for the annual Vibha Dallas Marathon and surpassed the team's fundraising target of $18,000 by 40 percent.
Next, he stepped up as the volunteer coordinator for Vibha's Dallas Action Center. As coordinator, he quickly grew his team to more than 30 volunteers and raised annual revenue to about $50,000.
"While serving as the Dallas coordinator, Kumar successfully managed a lot of teams, projects, fundraising events, volunteers and marketing," said Ganesh Gopalakrishnan, a Dallas Vibha coordinator.
"Under his leadership, fundraising for the chapter doubled and the number of volunteers increased fourfold. He is a great leader and motivator."
"I've learned that selecting a beneficiary organization requires the same due diligence as identifying a new market in the business world. While the actual metrics may vary, both require analysis of long-term growth potential, return on investment and alignment with organization's vision. While every child development initiative needs monetary support, the impact differs across projects. One of the skills that this volunteer role has helped me develop was to try and make objective decisions and ensure efficient use of resources, particularly in situations where lots of emotional forces are in play and could bias one's decision."
— Kumar Parthasarathy
Growing his leadership skills
Kumar served as the Dallas Action Center coordinator for about three years before taking on his current role as Vibha's national project director. Here, he has been overseeing Vibha's entire project portfolio and, to date, has disbursed close to $8 million dollars through Vibha to impact the lives of over 150,000 underprivileged children in the U.S. and India.
As part of his leadership responsibilities, Kumar leads a committee of 40 project stewards, as well as three highly experienced senior social development professionals employed by Vibha in India, in project selection, monitoring, financial and operational activities within an annual budget of approximately $700,000.
Recently, Kumar and his team identified and selected two high-potential organizations in India that address underprivileged children in government schools and the children of migrant laborers. In collaboration with Vibha's grant team, Kumar also helped to secure a $40,000 grant from the Yahoo Foundation to support these children's educational needs.
"Kumar has been an integral part of the leadership team at Vibha for several years and has been contributing significantly in the selection and monitoring of the projects that we support," said Vijay Vemulapalli, a Vibha board member.
"On an average, he spends 10 hours per week for Vibha in the process of evaluating the projects and making sure the money is put to best use at the grassroots level."
A committed volunteer
Since 2005, Kumar has also been a core member of Vibha's national project selection committee. This team is responsible for identifying and selecting the nonprofit, non-governmental social entrepreneur-driven organizations that Vibha funds.
"The selection team meets several hours every week over conference calls to discuss and do due diligence to the selection procedure," Vijay said.
"This includes analyzing the impact of work done by the beneficiary organization, understanding the long term vision and doing background checks on the partner organizations."
In addition to managing fundraising events, awareness booths and providing publicity for Vibha over the past decade, Kumar has also been a hands-on volunteer working at City House in Plano, Texas, and Children's Medical Center in Dallas, Texas.
