Employee volunteering and CSR outreach program FY2024-25
Firstsource · 2024 · Community
In FY2024-25 Firstsource ran 1,027 outreach events with 6,842 employee volunteers and donors logging 21,042 volunteering hours, spending INR 72.90 million on CSR projects and reporting 52,098 lives (including animals) impacted.
A year of employee volunteering at scale
Corporate volunteering programmes are easy to announce and hard to sustain. Firstsource's FY2024-25 numbers suggest a programme that its people actually turned up for, run across the year rather than as a one-off day of service.
Across the financial year the company reported 1,027 outreach events, drawing 6,842 employee volunteers and donors who together logged 21,042 hours of volunteering. Firstsource spent INR 72.90 million on CSR projects over the period and reported 52,098 lives impacted, a tally that, by the company's own accounting, includes animals as well as people.
The numbers that matter
- 1,027 outreach events held during FY2024-25.
- 6,842 employee volunteers and donors took part.
- 21,042 volunteering hours logged.
- INR 72.90 million spent on CSR projects.
- 52,098 lives impacted, including animals.
The headline volunteering metrics are corroborated by independent reporting on Firstsource's FY2025 disclosures, which cite more than 6,800 employees participating, in excess of 21,000 volunteering hours, and over 52,000 individuals benefiting from the company's CSR initiatives. Firstsource also reports a social return on investment of 8.6 times on its community spending.
Where the effort went
The events span Firstsource's core CSR themes: education, healthcare, community development and the environment. On the ground that has meant work such as STEM labs and digital classrooms in government schools, cataract surgeries and rural ICU support, and tree-plantation and urban-forest drives. The inclusion of animals in the lives-impacted count points to animal-welfare activity sitting alongside the human-focused programmes.
Total CSR spending for the year came to roughly INR 7 crore, with a substantial share directed to education, much of it channelled through the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group's CSR trust.
How it fits Firstsource's wider CSR
Volunteering is the participatory layer on top of Firstsource's funded CSR. Where cheque-writing moves money, an employee-volunteering programme of this size moves people, and it tends to signal a workforce that identifies with the company's stated purpose. Firstsource has framed its approach as treating CSR not as a parallel effort to the business but as an extension of it.
The model is common among large BPO and IT-services employers, whose main asset is a big, distributed white-collar workforce. That workforce is precisely what makes structured volunteering feasible at the scale of a thousand events a year.
Why it matters
Employee volunteering programmes contribute to several Sustainable Development Goals depending on the activity, from quality education (SDG 4) and good health (SDG 3) to climate and life-on-land goals through the environmental work. The reported 8.6x social return on investment is the company's own estimate of the value created per rupee spent; like all SROI figures it depends on the assumptions behind it, but it signals an intent to measure outcomes rather than only count inputs.
The more durable point is cultural. A company that can mobilise nearly 7,000 volunteers for a thousand events has built social contribution into how it operates, not bolted it on. That is the difference between a CSR line item and a CSR habit.