Impact Day 2008

On 14th June, my company Deloitte (India) celebrated The Impact Day. On this day all employees of this huge firm dedicate one full working day to community service. The day is meant to be celebrated on the first Friday of June in all the branches of Deloitte. However, Hyderabad celebrated it on 14th June due to the "India Band" called by the political parties in response to the government's decision to hike fuel price.

For me Impact day was going to be special as I was leading a thread "Greener Hyderabad" which aimed at making the city greener. This time however, we butressed our regular activity of planting trees with the plan of establishing a vegetable gardening for the underprevileged segments of our society. By this we also intended to cut the food miles and this is quite relevent to containing global warming.

It was an important day of my life as it put my planning, leading and execution skills to test. I had to manage a group of 120 people who had limited, to say the least, gardening skills. A major setback was the sudden postponement of the event due to the turbulant political situation. The central planning team, after a thorough discussion with thread leads took a call and postponed the event. It was difficult for me as most of my materials had already been trucked to the intended locations and could have perished without proper care but thanks to the management of the old age home and the Women Rehabilitaion home, where we carried out our activities, our stuff was well taken care of.

Finally we did manage to pull it off and the dedicated volunteers, undermining the hard work gardening entails, exceeded the expectations and lead by example. We managed to make a vegetable garden out of a 15000 sq feet of barren land. Its produce will feed the 500 inmates of an old age home. In addition to this we also created a park and planted 200 odd trees which will make our environment healthier. So at the end of the day I can safely aver that I along with my group did make an Impact:)