Sub-par growth opportunities, lack of visibility and access to career opportunities (including those outside of their immediate region or function), or simply “I feel like I can’t develop my career here anymore” are regularly cited as among the leading reasons for talent turnover. Combined with a wave of ‘purpose and work/life resignations’ the urgency to launch impactful employee engagement initiatives is especially pressing.

Employees want to connect with each other and with their communities in personally and professionally meaningful ways. This insight is relevant to talent retention, to recruitment and to the onboarding of new hires – and it is also relevant to core business. Indeed, distributed and remote ways of working alongside gig economy dynamics increasingly present a case for ensuring employees are able to access and realise as many adjacent opportunities as possible. Isolation within functional or regional silos is not only demotivating it also gets in the way of creative collaboration and connection through the ‘adjacently possible’. The costs to company innovation and culture are severe, and increasingly foreground questions around what counts as internally as well as externally inclusive communities.

Employee volunteerism can be a huge part of effective and inclusive engagement, especially when combined with opportunities for building skills, visibility and access. Recognition and feedback across levels and teams is especially valuable in empowering employees to take ownership of their own personal and professional growth – an important factor in future proofing any workforce. Yet all too often, volunteer initiatives appear superficial, tokenistic and disconnected from the company ecosystem. This is unfortunate because virtual volunteering, and e-mentoring especially, can provide almost frictionless, yet hugely impactful personal and professional growth to employees, while at the same time reaching into under-served communities across the globe. Mentoring is a largely unrealised opportunity for social change as well as for employee engagement. We firmly believe e-mentoring can be harnessed for social change at scale, while also providing organisations with the meaningful growth opportunities that they want for their teams.

SAYes offers Partner Programmes to corporates, linking transition programming – through virtual volunteering/e-mentoring – to social and community impact initiatives that your company wishes to support. Various levels of programme customisation are available, depending on the recruitment (versus nomination) and training of beneficiary (mentee) groups, the programme design and programme support requested.

We have built partner programmes with corporate teams from around the world and amazing groups of young people (aged between 14 and 32 years) in the UK and South Africa. We have extensive experience with care experienced young people, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBTQI+ youth, first time job seekers, interns, sport for development coaches, youth in conflict with the law, teenage parents, youth-headed households, youth in foster care, high school students, students on scholarships, university students, youth change-makers, youth with mental health challenges, and youth with special needs and disabilities.

Intersect diversity, inclusivity and equality through effective altruism

We exist to end social poverty. Whatever your charitable commitments, if you are not addressing social poverty, you are undermining the impact of your support. SAYes provides effective, inclusive, and professionally managed social and community impact initiatives, designed to enhance and compound material support through powerful behavioural and perspective change. We are sensitive to the many ways in which sentiment-based initiatives can create incentives which disempower and exploit under-served young people, reinforcing inequalities and furthering divisions. We are determined to apply principles from science and business to improve the bottom line of philanthropy, and raise the quality of the conversations, the practice and the research in social change. Our Partner Programmes allow companies to align their philanthropic vision with evidence-based, structured and supported programming delivered tractably, sustainably and at scale.

SAYes is a Charitable Company registered with the Charity Commission and Companies House in the UK, and a Registered Trust, Non-profit Organisation (NPO), Public Benefit Organisation (PBO), and Section 18a in South Africa. We support our social change programmes through a combination of;
• Donations & Grants: From philanthropists and foundations who share our vision of doing good better
• Nominal Programme Fees: From independent volunteer mentors
•Partnerships: From business propositions including training courses, partner programmes, and consultancy

Donations and supported social change partnerships are tax exempt and eligible for Individual & Corporate Gift AID in the UK, and (along with staff volunteer time) score B-BBEE points in South Africa.