School lunch service with Akshaya Patra Foundation
Conduent · 2024 · Community
In 2024, Conduent associates volunteered 84 hours serving lunch to students at the Government School in Kadugodi, Whitefield, India, in partnership with the Akshaya Patra Foundation.
Feeding schoolchildren in Whitefield
In 2024, associates at Conduent, the U.S.-headquartered business process services company, spent 84 hours serving lunch to students at the Government School in Kadugodi, Whitefield, on the eastern edge of Bengaluru, India. The volunteering was carried out in partnership with the Akshaya Patra Foundation, and it is one of the community highlights the company records in its 2024 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.
The effort was modest in scale but concrete in purpose: putting a hot midday meal in front of children at a government-run school in a country where nutrition and school attendance are closely linked. Conduent frames the activity plainly, as work done "to support underserved communities."
Part of a wider India volunteering push
The Kadugodi lunch service was not a standalone gesture. Conduent reports that associates across its India footprint, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kochi, Vizag and the national capital region, contributed time to several community and environmental initiatives in 2024.
- Organizing a dental checkup camp for more than 100 associates at the company's Vizag office.
- Partnering with the INPM trust to donate groceries, toys and books to 40 orphaned children through ConduentCARES.
- Volunteering 152 hours to Lebenshilfe, a non-profit dedicated to empowering individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
The partner: Akshaya Patra
The Akshaya Patra Foundation is a natural partner for a school-lunch program. Founded in 2000 with mid-day meals for 1,500 children in five Bengaluru schools, it has grown into the largest NGO partner of the Government of India for implementing the country's PM POSHAN school-meal scheme.
According to the foundation, it now serves over 2.25 million children through kitchens in 78 locations across 16 states and three union territories, and has cumulatively distributed more than four billion meals since inception. Its work has been recognised with India's Gandhi Peace Prize (2016) and the BBC Global Food Champion Award (2019). For a company sending volunteers to serve lunch, that infrastructure means the meals reach a school already inside a proven feeding network rather than a one-off handout.
How Conduent organises its giving
Conduent operates in 24 countries with approximately 56,000 associates, and it channels community work through a volunteer program called ConduentCARES, supported by its primary philanthropic vehicle, The Conduent Foundation. The company says the foundation and its volunteering concentrate on five focus areas: quality of life (poverty and hunger), health and wellness, veterans, environment, and education.
The Kadugodi meals sit squarely at the intersection of two of those areas, quality of life and education. Conduent also runs an annual "Proud to be Conduent" volunteering month each January; in 2024 the theme was "give a little, change a lot."
It fills me with great joy to be able to see the faces of happy children receiving their school supplies... these kids are being given the tools they need to successfully continue their studies, become professionals and change their future.
That reflection, quoted in the same report, captures the logic behind the school-focused volunteering: nutrition and supplies as an on-ramp to staying in education.
Why it matters
School feeding is one of the most evidence-backed development interventions, tied to attendance, learning and child nutrition, and it maps directly onto the UN Sustainable Development Goals for zero hunger, good health and quality education. Conduent says its sustainability focus areas align with eight SDGs.
For the business-services and outsourcing industry, which employs large workforces in cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad, activity like the Kadugodi lunch service is a template worth noting: local, employee-led, and routed through an established implementing partner so that a small number of volunteer hours plugs into meals that are already reaching millions. Eighty-four hours will not by itself change a city, but delivered through Akshaya Patra's kitchens it lands as real meals for real children, and it signals how a global employer chooses to show up in the communities where its people work.