“Everyone’s culture is different. But the purpose is same”, says Volunteer Hero 2012 Kartheeban

Volunteer Hero 2012 C. Kartheeban visited the Points of Light conference in Washington D. C. on Volunteering and Service in June. He used this opportunity to visit some spectacular sites, connect with inspiring volunteers from over 40 countries and simply have great time!

Here’s an excerpt from an interview he gave Techgoss.

Kartheeban has founded Team Everest, a volunteering organization with major focus on education. The team has carried out more than 1000 community services till date. Most of their activities take place in rural villages of Tamil Nadu.

 In April, 2013, C. Kartheeban received the prestigious iVolunteer Award.

 Kartheeban won the title of ‘Volunteer Hero 2012’ and  was facilitated by Guest of Honour, Ms. Nandita Das. In recognition of his efforts to  community development, the Volunteer Hero 2012 winner Kartheeban also  attended the ‘Points of Light’s Conference’, one of the World’s largest conference on  volunteer services, held in Washington, D.C recently.

 Kartheeban said, “It was a mind blowing experience for me. These 10 days at the conference were a huge learning experience.”

 Kartheeban is happy to have met so many volunteers from 40 different countries at the venue in USA. He noted that everyone had the same passion and energy to help people and make life better in this world. “The thoughts, love and care for fellow living being is the same” Kartheeban told Techgoss, “I never thought in my life that human beings across the globe will have similar feelings for others. A volunteer in Australia and a volunteer from Korea think alike. Everyone’s culture is different. But the purpose is same. Everyone wants to make a difference and help someone become happy.” 

While expressing his view of all other IT, BPO, Start-up professionals he met at the conference, Kartheeban said, “Everyone at the conference had one single goal – ‘Make people’s life better. A lot of people whom I met were volunteers, teachers, community organizations and IT people who developed software for effective volunteer management program. A lot of tools are available on internet to organize the volunteer work that we do. For NGO’s,  such tools are a boon. Every organization needs to look at these tools online and select one which suits best for them. Adopting such tools requires huge change management. However, tools like them help an organization save time, money and resources which can be used for impacting more lives.”

Kartheeban also learnt important lessons during the conference. He opined that Community Organizations in developed countries and organizations who have scaled big use the right tools to manage their organization work effectively. He noticed that is something missing in India. “We have a lot of small scale grass root groups in India who can scale with right tool and guidance”, says Kartheeban.

“Every NGO in every country operates and does volunteer management in their  own style”  says Kartheeban, “Every organization does their operation and task  management  differently. Existing tools online cannot be used as such by many of  our local organizations.  They need customization to suit our working model. If  any entrepreneurs in India can learn   the NGO sector, understand the problems  better and come up with right tools to help NGO’s   manage and do their things  effectively, we can tremendously improve their productivity. I   felt, this is an  opportunity yet to be grabbed. If some importance is given to this market, we  can  empower Indian NGO’s with right tools which can improve their work by 100  times  than what they do now.”

Kartheeban is back in India doing what he does best – Volunteering and inspiring by example!