Colombia workshops for women and LGBTQIA+ communities
Sutherland · 2024 · Dei
Colombia volunteers ran donations and workshops at the Harvesting Love Foundation supporting single mothers and vulnerable rural women, plus empowerment workshops for LGBTQIA+ members, as part of over 5,810 volunteer hours.
Volunteering with a purpose in Colombia
Across 2024, employees at Sutherland's Colombia operations logged more than 5,810 hours of volunteering, one of the busiest country-level social programs recorded in the outsourcing firm's latest sustainability report. The effort spanned everything from home-building to beach cleanups, but two threads stand out: sustained support for women in rural poverty and empowerment work with LGBTQIA+ communities.
According to the company's Sustainability Report 2024, the Colombia team channeled part of those hours into "donations and workshops at the Harvesting Love Foundation in Bogota and Barranquilla, supporting single mothers and vulnerable women in rural areas." A separate strand of the program ran "empowerment workshops for LGBTQIA+ members."
What the volunteers actually did
The 5,810-plus hours covered a wide slate of activities in Colombia's two main Sutherland hubs, Bogota and Barranquilla. Beyond the women's and LGBTQIA+ workshops, the report lists:
- Building houses for two families in Bogota and Barranquilla in partnership with TECHO (Techo Para Mi Pais), a Latin American NGO that works on informal-settlement housing.
- A youth health workshop covering sex awareness and early-pregnancy prevention, paired with the distribution of health kits.
- Beach cleanups in Barranquilla and tree-planting drives — 200 trees in Bogota and 300 in Barranquilla.
- Collecting and delivering toys to foundations supporting children from vulnerable families.
The mix is deliberately broad, but the anchor partnerships — the Harvesting Love Foundation for women and the LGBTQIA+ empowerment sessions — are the pieces the company chose to foreground under the diversity, equity and inclusion side of its social work.
How it fits Sutherland's wider social program
Colombia is one of Sutherland's larger delivery geographies. The company reports a global footprint of 61 delivery centers across a workforce of roughly 40,000 professionals, and Colombia sits alongside the Philippines, India, Egypt, Jamaica, Mexico and Bulgaria as a country where its community programs are most active.
The Colombia volunteering rolls up into what Sutherland calls its Social Pillar, under which the company recorded 11,104 volunteering hours across the business in 2024. Sutherland frames that pillar around "employee-driven volunteering" as a "catalyst for community impact," and says its activities that year touched 11 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The women-focused and LGBTQIA+ workshops map most directly onto SDG 5 (gender equality) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). The rural-women support through the Harvesting Love Foundation also intersects with SDG 1 (no poverty), given the report's emphasis on single mothers and vulnerable rural households.
The DEI and impact-hiring backdrop
The Colombia workshops are not a standalone gesture; they sit against a broader diversity and inclusion posture. Sutherland reports a global workforce that is 45% women and 55% men, and Colombia features repeatedly in its "impact hiring" data — the company's term for recruiting from disadvantaged or under-represented groups.
In its Economic Pillar, Sutherland says 5,271 lives were "positively impacted" through empowerment and impact-hiring programs in 2024, with USD 612,000 invested and 21 local partnerships established. In Colombia specifically, the company says it onboarded "over 300 interns from impoverished areas of the country" through its SENA investment — a reference to Colombia's national vocational training service — with interns earning a wage while receiving on-the-job training before being hired or moving into other employment.
The report also notes that 17% of all new hires company-wide in 2024 were impact hires, surpassing an internal 10% target, with Colombia cited as one of the leading contributors for disadvantaged-youth hiring and the leading contributor for the displaced-people category.
Why it matters
For a business-process outsourcing firm, community programs like these are partly reputational and partly a talent play — the same disadvantaged communities the workshops serve are also recruitment pools in a competitive labor market. But the specifics here are concrete and verifiable: named partner foundations, defined beneficiary groups, and a tallied volunteer-hour figure rather than a vague pledge.
The gender and LGBTQIA+ focus is also notable in a Colombian context, where rural women and LGBTQIA+ people face documented economic and social exclusion. Sutherland's contribution is modest in absolute terms, but the report ties it to recognized development goals and to the company's own hiring practices, which gives the volunteering a throughline beyond one-off charity.