As Lead Corporate Citizenship Specialist, Sohini Karmakar manages Citrix’s corporate social responsibility efforts in the APJ region. When the surge in COVID-19 cases in India hit this spring, she says, it was a wide-reaching disaster that affected everyone and that required a strong response from corporations and individuals. Here, as part of our Women @ Work series spotlighting women at Citrix, she talks about Citrix’s work to help support employees in need and their communities.
My role is to respond to the community’s needs, and this has been a true disaster-relief response. Not just for our external communities, but for our internal community. We’ve lost family members, friends, colleagues. The circumstances have been very difficult. We’re grieving, too, but we had to come together and react as quickly as possible.
We created an employee volunteering group, so we could respond to our colleagues’ needs 24×7. People started reaching out to me when, for example, they were struggling to find a hospital bed for a family member. It wasn’t sustainable, and I couldn’t answer every query. We put out a call for employee volunteers and got together an amazing group of 48 employees who each take on a four-hour shift so we have someone available at all hours, every day. We are there so someone always responds, no matter what time, and can connect our colleagues with the information they need.
We’ve also gotten an amazing response from employees all over the world, just asking how they can help. We set up an employee-giving page and raised $23,000 including a corporate match that we can put directly into our communities. Employees from the Nanjing office even helped us source oxygen concentrators that we’ve gotten to support colleagues in India and their families during this time of crisis.
We’re been constantly evaluating, what are the real needs here? And how can we work in tandem with the government and ensure we aren’t duplicating efforts? We’re also constantly monitoring our peers, so that we can understand what they’re doing and learn from the best practices they’re developing. We wanted all of Citrix’s community support to go toward marginalized populations in our communities who are suffering with COVID-19 the most. So far, $103,553 has been donated to support the emergency healthcare needs and various rehabilitative efforts to support the communities impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. Sponsoring free vaccination for transgender communities, daily wagers, homeless and specially-abled individuals has been among our key community outreach initiatives we have taken up as part of our COVID-19 relief response.
I worked in the nonprofit sector for seven years, before coming to Citrix, and that experience has helped me understand what happens on the ground, what the actual problems are, and what it takes to get a project going that can have real impact. I knew what it was like to be on the other side of the table, and when I joined Citrix, I wanted the company to be a partner in the community, not just a donor organization. That’s what we’ve done here.
We’ve seen so much goodness and solidarity amid this crisis. And nothing is too small — time, money. Every little bit can go toward something that can help save a life.
Read more about women at Citrix in our Women @ Work series and learn more about Citrix’s corporate citizenship efforts.
