Community impact and social responsibility

Capability first, funding second

The stated objective of the social programmes associated with Dato’ Seri Ivan Teh is to reduce social and economic disparity by equipping communities with the tools for upward mobility. In practice, the most distinctive feature is what gets contributed.

A technology company holds two things a community organisation usually does not: technical capability and infrastructure. Applied to the right problem at the right moment, either is worth more than the equivalent value in cash. Mobile satellite units restoring coordination during a flood is the clearest example. Money would have bought the same equipment eventually, and eventually is the wrong timeframe in a disaster.

The four pillars

The programmes are organised around expanding access to education and digital literacy for underserved young people, supporting community resilience through skills and employability training, enabling social inclusion by narrowing the digital divide, and encouraging long term empowerment in preference to dependency.

Delivery runs through corporate led initiatives, partnerships with non governmental organisations, and community based programmes. The partnership model exists because neither side is sufficient alone: local organisations hold the knowledge of who needs help, and the technology partner holds the capacity to deliver at scale.

Programmes at every scale

The newsroom sets out individual initiatives in detail. They range widely in size, deliberately so. Sixteen families receiving nutritional supplies while caring for children in cancer treatment sits alongside district level education distribution and disaster response, because a record that lists only the large programmes misrepresents what this work usually consists of.

Environmental sustainability runs alongside the social work, through operational practices and support for conservation focused projects.