Cognizant Canada’s Outreach volunteerism took a new leap when we came across an opportunity to organize and host the workshop on the topics of ‘Making a website using wordpress’ and ‘Web Concepts’ in collaboration with Techgirlz.

Cognizant’s employee volunteering program ‘Outreach’ has completed 10 years and impacted 4,50,000 lives through its work in the areas of education, community welfare and environment. During this period, over 100,000 Cognizant employees clocked in two million hours of volunteering across 20 countries, making Outreach one of the largest corporate volunteering efforts. Outreach is entirely driven by the passionate employees of Cognizant, and inspired by Cognizant’s commitment to alleviating disparities in educational access and equity, and better preparing today’s students for tomorrow’s opportunities in a competitive world.

In line with Cognizant’s Diversity and Inclusion agenda the focus through these mini workshops was to encourage girls take the forefront in technology as well as help them build a base towards a strong future career.

We promoted the workshop in neighborhood schools in Toronto as well as sent out an email to all associates in Cognizant Canada. The response was amazing and our Outreach volunteers were excited to see this shape up and organize this at Cognizant’s offices in Toronto.

We structured our volunteer team in such a way that each of us play an important role in the success of this workshop. And since we were dealing with middle school teenagers, we wanted to make it a really good experience for them.

We arranged for conference rooms and computers for the students to access during the workshop. The workshops started with an ice-breaker game to make the kids feel comfortable and welcome in a fun environment to foster better learning. The students enjoyed the ice breaker game as it gave them a chance to open up and also make friends with their fellow participants. Post the ice-breaker, the actual session started with a lot of interactivity between the trainers and the students. The team had specifically prepared the course content in a way that it did not sound like just another lecture but a session that encouraged critical thinking and logical reasoning abilities of the students.

The workshops saw a massive turn out in both the offices and got a great response from participants and their parents who were keen to introduce these web concepts to their kids at an early age. It gave the kids an opportunity to also visit the Cognizant office and get a feel of the corporate office culture and environment. The parents were really [excited] for their kids to get this kind of exposure so early in their education journey as this was a perfect environment fostering experiential learning.

We were all delighted when we heard the girls say the below..it was surely a YAY moment.

“I really enjoyed the session today and definitely learnt a lot”

“I love how the trainer taught us the concepts using a real life blog project.”

“With these learnings I am sure to keep creating posts and keeping my blog updated.”

Our volunteers also shared the below.

“The workshop was a great opportunity for us to learn as well and what best to learn it with our next gen.”

“My kids would love to attend these too, Looking forward to organizing these for other age groups too.”

“Gift of education and an opportunity to impart it – what more can we ask”