Our History
Community Connections was founded in 2015 by members of investment banks CLSA, Macquarie, Nomura, and asset manager State Street Corporation.
As a collaborative program to connect corporate employees with local charities that seek directors, committee members, and skills-based volunteering, Community Connections also provides training to equip corporate employees with leadership skills.
In 2016, as Community Connections extended to Singapore, Credit Suisse joined the group of founding companies, followed by accounting and consulting company PwC a year later. Over the years, almost 200 corporate volunteers have been paired up with around 100 NGOs.
In 2020 FSI took over the programme and aims to expand the support services for both NGO and corporate partners.
Vision and Mission
Building a community of transformational leaders and becoming HK’s leading organization for social innovation and entrepreneurship; creating, solidifying, replicating, and promoting a Shared Impact model.
Our mission is to address society’s most challenging problems through community building and shared resources. We do that by helping high-impact organizations reach their full potential, resolve bottlenecks, and maximize resources, thus driving collective social impact.
With Community Connections, FSI hopes to empower the NGOs with problem-solving business mentalities, while providing opportunities for corporates to contribute back to the society through skills-based volunteering.
Our Services
For our NGO participants:
- Prepare NGOs for Connection Sessions, so that they can find suitable, long-term partnership with corporate participants for mutual benefits.
- Comprehensive evaluation of current boards and strengths and weaknesses in the context of their current plans,
Empower NGOs with skills such as pitching practice and corporate expertise through one-on-one advice and consultation. - Build and share online resources and toolkits with NGO participants to help them reduce operation costs and increase efficiencies as well as improve efforts on board and advisory creation, governance, director and insurance, financial and legal literacy, among others.
- Match NGO participants with a broad array of skilled professionals, thereby helping them gain more practice in private sector engagement.
For our corporate participants:
- Provide our corporate participants with new perspectives on local community issues and the operation of NGOs.
- Enable corporate participants to reinforce their corporate culture through skills-based volunteering, through short-term one-off volunteering, long-term skills-based volunteering, joining a stakeholder or an advisory board, or joining as a board member.
Participating Corporates in 2020
Testimonials
When I first started with Community Connections it was focused on matching professionals with board roles on NGOs. However, it took a few tries and a few years to find an NGO that I wanted to make the time commitment for. I think the Connection Sessions are always so memorable – being in that room which is buzzing with exciting conversations and full of passionate people. It’s hard not to be energized and inspired after that. The Community Connections Program gave me exposure to a number of different charitable organizations very quickly, something I don’t think I would have been able to do easily on my own.
Sun Kim
When I participated in the first Community Connections session in 2017, I expected to better understand the NGO landscape in HK, to identify a few NGOs where there was alignment of vision and mission and I would be interested to volunteer my skillset. What was memorable was that there was a diversity of causes represented at Community Connections. It was heartening to see so many worthwhile causes represented there. Because of the program, I became a board member of Foundation for Shared Impact (FSI). My ongoing commitment includes developing impact assessment, conceptualizing strategy, networks and partnerships.
Sanjukta Mukherjee Head of Thought Leadership and Asset and Wealth Management Insights, PwC