JPMorgan trains leaders by combining HR with corporate volunteering

The participants have been split into three teams and are working with three non-profits.

In what could be seen as a combination of corporate volunteering and Human Resources (HR) initiatives, banking major JPMorgan Chase is running a global programme called Service Corps. It combines team-based, experiential leadership development with strategic philanthropic purposes.

Nineteen top-performing employees from six countries in Asia are participating in this programme and the cohort is currently in India. Through this initiative, JPMorgan’s top-performing employees put their skills to work for the investment bank’s nonprofit partners.

To be sure, the mechanism for selecting the volunteers can vary by market/region but at the core are two things: each business or market or HR nominates the employees; Pyxera Global, the bank’s implementation partner, then matches the nominees to the problem it is trying to solve for a non-profit.

The participants have been split into three teams and are working with three non-profits: Masoom, Lighthouse Communities Foundation, and Trust for Retailers and Retail Associates of India.

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The objectives of the projects include creating strategic frameworks for expansion, and building financial reporting tools and ways to measure and increase the organisation’s financial sustainability. This can also include projects focused on organisational capacity, business planning, and data analytics, among others.

“This program has two key benefits: it helps develop the leadership skills of employees who volunteer for it, but more importantly, it helps build the capacity of the nonprofit to have a deeper impact on the communities with who it works,” Maneesha Chadha, Head of Global Philanthropy, Asia Pacific, JPMorgan, told Moneycontrol.

To date, over 65 employees from India have participated, including seven this year.

Globally, since 2014, over 1,000 employees have supported more than 180 nonprofit organisations in more than 240 projects.

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Given that the volunteers selected are leaders and emerging leaders within the firm and the programme encourages them to be adaptive and resourceful while applying their expertise, JPMorgan said it contributes to developing their leadership skills.