Demonstrating leadership through Community Engagement
In this interview, Dr Vanita Sharma, Advisor - Strategic Initiatives, Reliance Foundation, expands upon the tenet of Community Engagement from the 10 Tenets of Building Leadership Capital and talks about how it is demonstrated through Reliance Foundation initiatives.
What do the 10 Tenets mean to you?
Dr Vanita Sharma (VS): I think the 10 Tenets are a really useful reminder for all of us in terms of what really shapes our unique way of working in Reliance and for us in Reliance Foundation.
It also provides us with a useful framework to make sure that is something we're always delivering on.
Whether you're a leader or a team member, these are all principles that we aspire to live by and help drive our work to be able to support communities. Community Engagement is an important tenet of leadership.
Can you explain how this is demonstrated in the work done by Reliance Foundation?
VS: I think the tenet of community engagement really does shape everything that we do at Reliance Foundation.
Reliance Foundation was set up in 2010 by our Chairperson Mrs Nita Ambani and its purpose is to implement all the philanthropic activities of Reliance.
We work in different areas, from rural transformation to helping to empower and support rural communities with improving livelihoods, to health, to education, to sports for development, women empowerment, disaster management, arts and culture, and urban renewal.
Over the last 13 years, our work has touched the lives of over 70 million people across the country so far and we have a very strong focus on empowering women and children, and youth as well.
We have a strong focus on empowering leaders too, not just within our organisation but within the Foundation itself both focusing on supporting our leaders and helping incubate new young talent through our young managers programme.
Through our rural transformation programme, we have worked a lot with leaders in villages at the village association level and at the gram panchayat level, supporting capacity building there.
Through our education program, we offer teacher awards to promote and encourage teaching excellence.
We have a scholarship programme where we're helping to incubate and support rising talent who we hope will be the future leaders of tomorrow in India and through programmes like our WomenLead India Fellowship, we're helping to incubate and support women leaders in the social sector.
It [Community Engagement] really drives the essence of all of the work that we do and it's all very much driven by the Foundation and Reliance's overall vision of 'We Care'.
Could you share a few leadership lessons from your journey at Reliance?
VS: I think it's been a very humbling experience. One of the things I've gained is learning how to work at scale and the strong focus that Reliance has on developing innovations and using technology in creative ways.
The most humbling experience I had was during COVID-19. It was a hard time for everybody. But as organisations, both Reliance and Reliance Foundation quickly thought about what we were going to do to be able to support during that time through whatever initiatives we could do. That was one of the most humbling experiences to be part of.