IAOP - Global Impact Sourcing Award

THE AWARD

RECOGNIZING LEADERS IN IMPACT SOURCING, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

Impact Sourcing happens when organizations intentionally hire and provide career development opportunities to people who otherwise have limited prospects for sustainable employment. Impact Sourcing can provide the start of a meaningful career path leading to a lifetime of full employment and can happen in any geography.

Examples of Impact Sourcing in Practice

Creating jobs in underserved communities or emerging markets where high unemployment exists
Intentionally hiring workers who have fewer prospects for sustainable jobs and providing them training
Hiring people with disabilities
Hiring women where there is a disproportionately high unemployment rate for women
Creating a positive impact on local communities by creating employment opportunities
Earn-while-you-learn training programs
Creating job opportunities for refugees or rescued victims

Eligibility Requirements

The Impact Sourcing award evaluates how buyers or providers are creating jobs in underserved areas. These can be anywhere in the world and criteria is based on how they impact local communities with these jobs and the efforts undertaken to ensure success in these communities, i.e. outreach and training programs.

Leadership teams from customer or provider companies of any size are eligible for recognition.

Teams self-nominate through an online application
Companies do not have to be IAOP members
Winners are advised by year-end and recognized annually at the Outsourcing World Summit
Winning teams must agree to collaborate on the writing of a case study about their Impact Sourcing activities, which will be made publicly available through the IAOP website and other sources
Winners are selected by a judging panel from IAOP's Center for Social Impact leadership team.

Award Criteria

Applications are considered based on the significance of impact sourcing to their overall business strategy and are evaluated based on these categories:

How your company engages impact sourcing in:
- The procurement process
- Recruitment and hiring
- Employee benefits
- Other business strategies
Significance of impact sourcing to your company's overall business strategy
- Implementation, adoption, and encouragement of impact sourcing internally and with external partners
- How your impact sourcing strategy aligns with any of the United Nations SDG goals #1, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 17
Overall commitment to impact sourcing
- Short-term strategy
- Sustainable commitment

WATCH THE GISA FAQS VIDEO

Applications for the Global Impact Sourcing Award are also considered for inclusion in the Impact Sourcing Champions Index.

2024 GISA WINNERS

IMPACT THROUGH COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIP

ScaleHub offers work opportunities to people who would otherwise have limited options for earnings, or may be from marginalized communities due to location, gender, age, cultural and/or socioeconomic backgrounds, or may be underrepresented in the workforce, or are economically or socially marginalized. Our impact sourcing efforts can be viewed through the delivery of our collective intelligence service, which provides document and image processing to enterprises and suppliers worldwide. ScaleHub’s service combines artificial intelligence (AI) with human intelligence when it’s needed complete tasks otherwise unable to be completed by AI alone. We leverage crowds to complete these human-in-the-loop (HITL) activities—whether delivering work directly to global, public crowdsourcing marketplaces or to impact sourcing partners that focus on particular skill sets, or a combination of the two.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

We first started purposely reaching into marginalized populations in 2018. Since then, the labor market has undergone a certain amount of upheaval. Some of this was due to the pandemic, some was due to the growing acceptance of remote work, and some was due to the phenomena of 'the great resignation' and quiet quitting. Despite those things, companies still have customers to serve, and jobs still exist because there is work to be done. What impact sourcing did was to deepen the labor pool. When numerous large industries and small businesses report severe shortages of qualified personnel, the usual approach will not work. By almost any definition, impact sourcing requires looking into parts of the workforce that may be considered unusual. Domestically, about one-third of new US employees are from what the federal government defines as an economically challenged group. We provide the level of training that is necessary to address any skills gaps, particularly when it comes to being comfortable with different technologies used for communicating with customers. That is augmented by mentoring and coaching to increase employee confidence.

IMPACT SOURCING
INFLUENCER

Although HireMee is set up as a private company, it operates as a social enterprise with the goal of leveling the playing field for young graduates that have limited employment experience and/or are economically disadvantaged and seeking employment. The HireMee founders realized that most employers conduct recruitment activities at colleges located in major cities and that job seekers from smaller cities and towns miss out on these recruitment opportunities. The online HireMee platform was created to bridge this gap and can be accessed free of cost by anyone from anywhere, and individuals who complete the HireMee free pre-hire assessments are automatically connected to potential employers through the platform.

2024 Companies To Watch

2X
FSI Outsourcing
NextWealth
Onja

2023 GISA WINNERS

CONTINUOUS EXCELLENCE IN IMPACT SOURCING

Avasant has been actively involved in Impact Sourcing since 2008. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Avasant in 2011 to highlight key policy initiatives and incentives that could help to scale the Impact Sourcing sector. The Foundation later worked with and was a grantee of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Digital Jobs Africa Initiative (DJA) in 2015 and educated service providers over two years about the benefits of creating jobs under Impact Sourcing. Through education and partnership, the Avasant Foundation created over 1,300 ICT-enabled jobs in Africa. Its Avasant Digital Youth Employment Initiative provides deserving youth with job-related skills training to enable employees in the leading ICT BPO industries in the Caribbean.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER (LARGE)

At Foundever we are committed to providing equitable and inclusive opportunities for our associates and in the communities where we live and operate. With an expansive global footprint, we recognize our opportunities for a positive social impact creating sustainability. By targeting recruitment activities in less advantaged or remote areas, or actively seeking potential associates who might be excluded from the job market, our efforts add a social and ethical dimension that can reap huge benefits for individuals and communities. We support impact sourcing through various initiatives and programs such as talent development programs for our associates and work experience programs. We also prioritize suppliers that intentionally hire and provide career development opportunities to people who might otherwise have limited opportunities for formal employment.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER (LARGE)

At Kelly we firmly believe there are many talented Americans who are qualified to fill the record number of job openings if they are given access and training. And when we provide equal access to meaningful work, we help businesses succeed and we change lives. Staffing companies play a crucial role in making that happen, and while we have helped job seekers from these talent groups find both temporary and full-time employment for decades, we doubled down on these efforts over the past two years through our Equity@Work initiative. We’re dedicated to building a more inclusive workforce. One where equitable access to work and growth for those who seek it is a reality—not a distant target. And we understand that simply participating in the dialogue isn’t enough.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER (SMALL)

A for-profit social enterprise established in 2009, B2R (Business-To-Rural) Technologies is one of the most-respected Impact Sourcing service providers in India; and the first Indian Impact Sourcing Service Provider to adopt the Global Impact Sourcing Standard (in March 2020). The philosophy of “conscience capitalism” drives it to operate with a unique model where social objectives coexist with commercial viability, making impact sourcing its sustainable raison d'être. B2R chose as its area of work the remote, socially conservative Indian border state of Uttarakhand in the Himalayan foothills, where nearly 18% population lives in poverty and income levels were a dismal US$ 20 (INR 1500) a month, earned from seasonal low-yield farming and intermittent tourism.

IMPACT SOURCING
INFLUENCER

Virtualahan offers a wholistic approach to address the high unemployment rate of disadvantaged communities, particularly People with Disabilities. We also serve solo parents, out-of-school youth, Indigenous People, recovering addicts, and People Deprived of Liberty. Our impact formula includes skills training for in-demand online jobs like lead generation, graphic design, customer service, social media management, content marketing, video editing, e-commerce, and basic website design. The job requirement is skill-based and do not require a college degree which most People with Disabilities do not have. Reasonable accommodation like sign language interpretation and closed captions is provided to make the training inclusive.

2023 Companies To Watch

Alorica
Five S Ddigital
Humans in the Loop
iMerit
ScaleHub

2022 GISA WINNERS

The 2022 GISA winners were announced during OWS22 on February 16, 2021. The awards were presented by Jon Browning, CEO, Global Mentorship Initiative and Chair of IAOP's CSR & SRO Committee.

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA) is a not-for-profit company that serves as the representative national industry body and trade association for those Global Business Services (GBS) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operators in South Africa serving the international and domestic markets. BPESA’s purpose is to promote and market South Africa to the world as an attractive location to offshore their service contracts or centres, thereby stimulating local job creation, particularly for unemployed, marginalised youth communities as part of its adoption and promotion of Impact Sourcing and Inclusive Hiring. The organisation also fulfils the important role of coordinating industry stakeholders to provide a sustainable supply of suitably skilled people to enable the sector to remain competitive and to grow in a socially responsible way by assisting to stimulate economic growth, new job creation and skills development.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Isahit is a socially oriented platform that gives digital work to women based in Africa, South America, Europe and Asia. Isahit’s ambition is to reduce poverty by giving work to disadvantaged people. Our target is women that earn less than 2$/day. At isahit, we outsource digital micro-tasks from international companies. Our community of HITers, mainly women (name given to our workers) are doing these digital micro-tasks on our crowdsourcing platform. The revenue generated by their work allows them to earn additional income in order to realize their various life projects (resume or continue their studies, create their micro-enterprise, finance training, etc.).

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

StepWise Inc. is an impact sourcing service provider with offices in the US and Kenya. With more than 15 years’ experience delivering value to more than 300 customers across five continents, StepWise is one of the founders of the impact sourcing movement. As the first B-Corp. certified in East Africa, StepWise is equally passionate about profits and purpose. StepWise uses the power of technology to train and equip persons from historically underserved communities, particularly, the youth, women and Persons with Disabilities, to compete and succeed in the 4th Industrial Revolution.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

A core element of Webhelp’s Group strategy is to build an Impact Sourcing model for global scale. Since being founded 21 years ago, Webhelp has remained devoted to developing sustainable and impactful business practices across our group. As a global outsourcer with a footprint in over 50 countries, we are uniquely placed to implement systemic, scalable, and sustainable Impact Sourcing practices. This enables us to serve better the societies in which we work while impacting the social and employment-related challenges unique to each country where we operate.

2022 Companies To Watch

Alorica
CAPE BPO
GlowTouch
iMerit
NextWealth
Foundever, formerly Sitel Group
Tech Mahindra

2021 GISA WINNERS

The 2021 GISA winners were announced during OWS21 on February 18, 2021. The awards were presented by Jon Browning, CEO, Global Mentorship Initiative and Chair of IAOP's CSR & SRO Committee.

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

As a non-profit company, CareerBox identifies and trains candidates from underprivileged townships and places them in entry-level digitally enabled jobs. Although sector and provider parameters are undefined, CareerBox has been fortunate to partner with one of the country’s largest domestic BPO employers, CCI Global (CCI). This partnership with CCI has enabled CareerBox to deliver on the promise of 100 000 lives being changed through job creation and permanent employment. CareerBox utilizes Impact Surveys to ascertain its influence and it has been found that, for every employee we place, four family members are now above the poverty line. Since inception we have placed around 35619 unemployed and previously disadvantaged candidates into permanent jobs with a sustainable income proving to have a positive impact of 142 000 lives being changed in and around the local communities. Our CareerBox gender ratio indicates that approximately 66% of placement were unemployed female.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Eclaro has 3 offices
and over 650 employees in Metro Manila in the Philippines. We also have a non-profit school
(kindergarten through college) that we run with 4 campuses and over 2,600 students. We pride
ourselves on giving back to the local community and helping our employees and their families in every way possible. From a hiring standpoint, we give every opportunity to candidates to be evaluated and ultimately hired, regardless of their background and socioeconomic position provided they have the right qualifications for the openings. We’ve hired 175 impact workers since the beginning of 2017, and have designed programs to hire even more impact workers over the upcoming years. In addition to this, our school plays a major factor in our impact sourcing vision. As education is important in gaining meaningful employment, we have instituted specialized programs to help students achieve the right
education and skills to be hired as future Eclaro employees. Additionally, we’ve developed a program which allows our clients to sponsor scholarships for underprivileged students to attend Eclaro Academy at no cost.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Under its ‘Business for Good,’ philosophy, IndiVillage employs more than 300 individuals from rural Indian communities in centres in Raichur district in Karnataka and Yemmiganur in Andhra Pradesh. Seeking to bridge the gap between urban and rural India, our is centred on a greater impact on women and rural communities through thoughtful scale, responsible business, and employee-centred initiatives. Our cutting-edge solutions include image and data annotation, natural language processing, and content optimization for some of the world’s leading technology and e-commerce companies including Amazon, Appen, Alegion, Swiggy, Mercato, and Inkers. Our ‘profit-for-all’ model, has seen profits reinvested into the rural communities where our employees live. Over the last decade, IndiVillage has impacted over 35,000 lives through sustainable community development initiatives such as access to clean drinking water, improved livelihoods, better healthcare, and standardized education.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Having incepted in Africa and being operational for well over 2 decades in 19 countries within Africa, the ethos of inception itself was to EMPOWER LIVES and provide exposure in building digital talents and digital literacy. Impact Sourcing within Techno brain is not just a way of empowering lives but also a cause that is very close to the heart of our organization as we get to employ people from marginalized and underprivileged backgrounds, provide necessary training and development, assist them with employment and watch them grow into their best forms, which also lets them live a decent life and also improve the lives of the people around them. This process has influenced the name PRIDE for the initiative which is Poverty Reduction through Information and Digital Employment. From a companywide perspective as efforts, we work direct with community based individuals and also have partnered with Community based organizations, and institutions where we have set up training facilities in underprivileged and marginalized localities.

2020 GISA WINNERS

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

ISS aims to be the best service organization in the world, and that is only possible if ISS is also an inclusive employer. As a major employer in the Netherlands and within the framework of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy, we see it as our responsibility to ensure that our workforce also reflects the diversity of our society. Vulnerable and/or underrepresented groups in society are therefore facilitated when it comes to finding work and continuing to work at ISS. Investing in work opportunities for targeted groups of employees helps us to become an employer of choice and further improve client satisfaction. In addition, being an inclusive employer plays a role in our ability to comply with contractual requirements and goals (SROI: social return on investment) on the part of many of our clients. Our overall goal in doing so is to not only ensure the economic sustainability of ISS but also to benefit society as a whole.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Televerde is a global sales and marketing company that specializes in inside sales and demand generation. We partner with some of the most recognizable brands in business today like SAP, Microsoft, Adobe-Marketo and Honeywell. We operate nine engagement centers around the globe, six of which are staffed entirely by females incarcerated inside three U.S. prison facilities. Today, 70 percent of our workforce is incarcerated. Our model is designed to prepare the incarcerated women who work for us for professional positions once they leave prison. We teach our agents the basics of sales and marketing including how to utilize personas, create and adhere to messaging and tips to finding final decision makers and influencers within target organizations. Sometimes referred to as a “mini MBA,” the women learn how to be consultative business partners for clients. Women learn how to close deals, work individually and as part of a team, manage conflict, problem solve, navigate change, communicate with senior executives, and collaborate with clients’ sales and marketing teams. This combination of learning enables them to gain professional experience in prison while building their careers and networks as they partner with the world’s top Fortune 500 companies.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

At Sutherland, we have a significant social impact mission: positively impact one life or family for every person employed by our company. We fulfill this mission through our worldwide commitment to inclusion — removing barriers to employment, empowering individuals and ensuring our employees represent and reflect our target communities across the globe. Our Three Categories of Intervention are: • Exposure o Sutherland exposes the wider community to education, technology, or career guidance, for example through mentorship, motivational and empowerment sessions • Investment o Sutherland invests strategically to create value, whether it’s through the support of Digital Empowerment Centers (DECs), education interventions, life skills training or any upskilling or base-level technical training activity in partnership with government and non-governmental organization (NGO) or community-based group. • Impact Hiring o Sutherland hires individuals from vulnerable groups that fall within the three target groups, as described below. Our Three Target Groups are: • Young people ages 17-25 who live at or below the poverty level • Single parents 17-25 with one or more children living at home • Individuals who are blind, deaf, or on the autism spectrum

IMPACT SOURCING IN A PURCHASING ORGANIZATION

RRD is a responsible global corporation committed to promoting sustainable and inclusive business and employment opportunities. Our journey with impact sourcing began in 2014 when we started working with an impact sourcing vendor, B2R, operating in villages in the foothills of the Himalayas. Our focus was always to ensure that the engagement made long-term business sense. To that end, we worked with B2R in a partnership that would deliver world-class services to our global clients. We made no compromises on quality, security, or infosec and built the engagement to match our strict global standards. The results have exceed our expectations.
Program Goals • Business value • Social & community impact • Gender parity • Environmental sustainability • Sustainable business expansion • Customer value • Cost optimization • Stability • Corporate citizenship • Gender parity

2019 GISA WINNERS

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

In Harambee's normal course of business we continue to drive various impact sourcing projects with large scale operators across the country. We have several very successful case studies with most of the large captive and outsourced operators but felt for this submission that our ecosystem work with industry and government would be more relevant. We would be more than happy to provide other case studies of individual clients we have worked with if required. Harambee have also taken a strategic ecosystem view of how to drive impact sourcing across the entire BPO sector in South Africa. To achieve this we have purposefully over the last two years partnered very strategically (commercially contracted) with the sectors industry body, Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA), and the relevant government arm responsible for the sector, The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). In doing so we have played a meaningful role in reshaping the countries BPO strategy and how it embraces impact sourcing at scale and readies the country for significant growth into the future.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

Samasource is a social business with a big vision: We fuel AI for humanity. Our mission is to train and hire low-income and marginalized people to work in the digital economy. We work with companies like Microsoft and Google, as well as smaller AI startups to deliver high-quality, complex training data for AI teams. Since 2008, we have trained and hired 10,000+ women and youth in Kenya, India, and Uganda. To date, our workers have been able to support over 46,000 people through their salaries. Currently, we have 2000+ people working at Samasource. In addition to radically altering the life trajectory of our workers by providing a living wage, we employ triple bottom line business practices at our facilities. For example, we invest in our people by providing ongoing training to help them move up the career ladder and serve subsidized, nutritious meals at our facilities. We are committed to gender equality, including equal pay for equal work. On average, 50% of our East African workforce is female. Additionally, we’re striving to include biophilic design into all of our offices and delivery centers.

IMPACT SOURCING PROVIDER

RuralShores is a unique social enterprise model, created with a mission of benefitting all the stakeholders’ viz rural India, Urban India and the Corporates. Rural India benefits as the rural economy is supported due to the additional Income generation and spending that happens locally. Urban India benefits as it has lesser people migrating into the already bursting cities with challenged Infrastructure and Corporates benefit due to availability of a large talent pool at a comparatively lower cost. RuralShores was formed in the year 2008; in its 9 year journey, RuralShores has been able to bring transformational changes in the rural Indian economy by training and employing the rural youth and empowering the underserved section of rural woman & People with Disability (PwD) by offering them sustainable employment opportunities in the BPO sector.

IMPACT SOURCING IN A PURCHASING ORGANIZATION

In 2016, Intuit adopted a sourcing strategy that supports our customer care growth needs in a very intentional way to bring jobs to underserved communities struggling with high unemployment. We have named this strategy Mission Hope and, while it was initially focused on customer care for QBO support only, as of 2018 has been declared as an Intuit-wide strategy. The essence of Mission Hope is to select communities within the U.S. that once prospered, but due to significant job loss, are now suffering an economic downturn. In these economically depressed areas, our customer care partners are able to position themselves as a premium employer through stable jobs and benefits that transform customer support from a short-term job into a career and thereby driving higher retention than other conventional contact center markets.

2018 GISA WINNERS

IMPACT SOURCING IN A LARGE ORGANIZATION

Teleperformance has been recruiting disabled and
socioeconomically disadvantaged youth under the age of 26
in developing countries for many years, providing training to
develop the skills necessary to match its client’s needs and for the
individuals to thrive in the company. In 2014, Teleperformance committed to creating 5,000 Impact Sourcing jobs over five years. By 2016 this goal was surpassed with over 25,000 Impact Sourcing hires. Currently, Teleperformance trains and employs approximately 50,000 individuals worldwide through its Impact Sourcing program. Its impact sourcing talent strategies include the hiring and development of disabled individuals, women,
U.S. veterans, active military members and members of their
immediate families, individuals who were long-term unemployed
and youth without previous formal employment.

IMPACT SOURCING INFLUENCER

IMPACT SOURCING PIONEER

Founded in 2001 with operations in Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya,
DDD is recognized worldwide for having pioneered Impact
Sourcing. DDD addresses the education and skills gap among
disadvantaged youth through its comprehensive Work-Study
Program, which includes training, employment, professional
development and academic scholarships. The company recruits
youth from disadvantaged families, including men and women with disabilities. Since its inception, more than 2,500 youth from these underserved markets have graduated from DDD’s Work-
Study Program. Apart from providing associates with gainful
employment in the formal sector, DDD has economically
empowered them to provide for their families, indirectly
improving the lives of an additional 5,000 individuals.

IMPACT SOURCING IN A PURCHASING ORGANIZATION

Impact Sourcing is Microsoft’s preferred sourcing strategy, aligning its mission with its procurement strategy. The company seeks to engage and learn from social enterprise impact sourcing service providers while extending its model to its own large multi-national suppliers. Microsoft has participated in a cross-industry/function stakeholder group to develop Impact Employment metrics, joined in over a dozen business cases on Impact Sourcing, and has committed to engage in Impact Sourcing. Its suppliers have committed to creating thousands of impact employment jobs. In fiscal year 2017, Microsoft supported Impact Sourcing projects in 14 countries, including the United States, Kenya, Uganda and India for services such as back-office work and facilities management.

For more information, please email info@iaop.org or Jon Browning, IAOP CSR Committee Chair.