How Volunteering Can Transform Communities and Your Career

Transcript

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Volunteering can be a powerful thing. It doesn’t just benefit others—it often has the side effect of helping the volunteer, too, whether they’re learning new skills or making new connections. But how do you get started?

Today we’re talking with project professionals about the work they’re doing off the clock to benefit their communities, the project management field and themselves.

In today’s fast-paced and complex business landscape, project professionals lead the way, delivering value while tackling critical challenges and embracing innovative ways of working. On Projectified®, we bring you insights from the project management community to help you thrive in this evolving world of work through real-world stories and strategies, inspiring you to advance your career and make a positive impact.

This is Projectified. I’m Steve Hendershot.

The 5th of December is International Volunteer Day. It’s a great way to celebrate how people across the globe can help others. Whether it’s donating their time to a professional organization to build community and give back to their field or serving in support of philanthropic causes or people in need, volunteers are delivering value to the people around them. 

Today we’re speaking with three people who’ve made a difference through volunteering—both through professional organizations including PMI, and in support of other causes. Our group includes Silvana Tovar, an international trade coordinator at Kenvue in São Paulo. She’s also the project manager of the Social Language Project at the PMI São Paulo, Brazil Chapter

We’ve also got Priya Patra, a director at Capgemini in Mumbai, India, and the vice president of outreach at the PMI Mumbai Chapter

And rounding out the group is Lebogang Ngoato, a program manager at Absa Group in Johannesburg. Lebo volunteers for PMI as the social impact lead for the Africa region. 

MUSICAL TRANSITION
 
STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Let’s kick off our discussion with how each of you started volunteering. What spurred you to start, and what has it meant to you? Priya, let’s go to you first.

PRIYA PATRA

I never thought that I could do something and create an impact before I started volunteering. I started with some short-lived assignments to experience what volunteering was. For example, I was a conference paper reviewer for [the] PMI India National Conference. That kind of changed my outlook. I was so impressed by the wealth of knowledge that I gathered from the assignment that it encouraged me to contribute more. And the best place was projectmanagement.com. I was replying to blogs, passing comments, answering questions in the community channels there. So one fine day in July, I remember it was a Saturday, I was browsing through my personal email, and I get an email from PMI saying, “You are invited.” And I saw that I was invited as an expert for the community booth at the PMI Global Congress in 2015 in Florida. 

That was my real first taste of what volunteering can give back to you. I went there. I connected with so many project managers, attended some sessions. And when I was back home, I started collaborating and making those connections even more meaningful. I started presenting in congresses. It’s an amazing experience of learning, connecting and networking. And since then, I never looked back.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

All right, Lebo, how about you?

LEBOGANG NGOATO 

Well, I started volunteering way before I got involved in PMI. When I was at college, I got involved in some youth organizations, a particular one was AIESEC; it was international students interested in economics and management. I became the local president in the college, and I loved it. Through that engagement, I was able to go to a conference in Germany. It was my first time flying out of South Africa to Europe. I’ll never forget that. 

When I became a project manager, I got certified in PMP in 2014. I decided to join the local chapter, and I was then recruited by Dr. Lynn Keeys. She’s currently a PMI board member. When she was the local president, she reached out to me and said, “Listen, give me your CV.” She got my CV and she said, “There’s a role that I’d like you to play within the chapter. Do it for the next few months, and if you don’t like it, let me know.” And that was a VP for PMIEF [PMI Educational Foundation] in my local chapter. So I said to Dr. Lynn, “Yeah, sure, let me give it a go.” And since then I never looked back. The role was purely to use PMI resources to go and train students from high school about project management knowledge and skills, and I enjoyed it. And today, eight years later, I’m still heavily involved in PMI, having attended a lot of conferences in Africa and in Europe, met a lot of people, networked a lot, and the experience has been amazing.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Great, thank you. Silvana, how about you?

SILVANA TOVAR 

I’m surprised that Lebo said he was a volunteer in AIESEC. I’ve met so many people in PMI that also started in AIESEC. I was a volunteer as well when I was in college. It started my volunteer experience then, and I enjoyed it very much.

I work in international trade, so I’m always worrying about the cargo that arrived and custom clearance and everything. [I] didn’t have much time to manage projects, and I totally hated managing projects. Every time I had a project, it was very bad. And then I started asking myself, “Why was that?” And then I realized that I didn’t like projects because I didn’t know how to do projects. So I was like, “Okay, I need to learn how to do projects. I think it’s going to be really good for my career” and to improve my résumé.
 
So I started an MBA in project management from the University of São Paulo, and then I realized that I loved projects and everything about it. I was discovering new concepts, new ways of doing things that made so much sense and that were so much easier. During the MBA, the teachers were talking a lot about PMI, and there were volunteering experiences in there. I started my membership, and then I loved it. I started right away volunteering, first as a member of projects. And then last year, I had my first opportunity to be the leader of a project. It has been great. I mean, I had the opportunity to know excellent and amazing people along the way, to develop so many skills. Different from Priya and Lebo, I’m just starting my career, and I’m pretty sure there are a lot of years of me working alongside PMI and contributing to the community.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Thanks, everyone. Now, how has volunteering affected the way that you think about your role as a project professional? 

LEBOGANG NGOATO 

Volunteering is about giving back. When I was a VP for social impact of PMIEF in the [PMI] South Africa Chapter, we didn’t have a lot of volunteers. But when I used to stand up and tell them about why do we go to schools and teach kids project management skills and knowledge, and the impact that we’re doing, it touches their hearts and most of them tend to respond to the call. When you give something to humanity, you always get something back in one way or another. Yes, most of us, we joined PMI because of networking with other professionals, but you get to know them better when you get involved in doing a tangible project within the chapter. I’ve used the skills in other areas also. At church when we run projects, you use those project management skills that you have. 

The big thing that I’ve learned is how to deal with people. Servant leadership is what I’ve learned, and being that type of a leader, it has worked for me even in my current work. I lead about 15 people, and I know how to get them to do things for me by just reaching out to them, showing empathy. 

SILVANA TOVAR

I had the opportunity recently to volunteer in an NGO that was with a group of refugees from Venezuela that was organized by the company I work for. It was so great, like Lebo said, giving back to the community, giving back to people who actually need it. I did a workshop on how São Paulo worked because these people had [come] to São Paulo recently. So it was really rewarding to be able to help them through this difficult moment. 

To volunteer in PMI, since it’s professional volunteering, it’s a little bit different. I currently do not work directly with managing projects at my company. So it gives me that safe environment to develop my skills, to be creative, to come up with new initiatives, new ways of doing things. It has allowed me to develop my leadership skills. When I started volunteering [at] PMI and actually being a leader of a project, it allowed me to see myself from another perspective. And now I can see myself as a leader of projects, of people. 

PRIYA PATRA

Volunteering for me is all about learning and cross-pollination of ideas between my work projects and my volunteering projects, right? And of course, networking. So let me give you an example. I work for the North America business unit within Capgemini, which means I work with customers, teams from the U.S., Canada a little. I always thought that the West was like the U.S. because that’s the only Western country I worked with until I started my volunteering initiative, which is the PMI Chapter Xchange, where we connected different chapters across the globe. South Africa, São Paulo, both the chapters are part of that initiative.

We right now have connected with 26 chapters across the globe. We co-create events every third Friday of every month. This taught me how to collaborate across countries, cultures and continents. And now when I come back to my workplace, I’m very confident I can work with people from any culture because I know how to navigate that. People say, “How do you manage virtual teams? How do you manage a high-performance, diverse team?” And I go back to them and say, “This is how you do it.” Because I’ve already got that experience through that volunteering initiative.

Another example, in my workplace, I would never have a chance to work with Gen Z teams; maybe one or two people from that generation is part of my team. But as part of my GROW initiative in [the PMI] Mumbai Chapter, I’m connecting with youth from different educational institutes, mentoring them, providing them that opportunity to look forward in their career as project managers. It gives me an opportunity to learn new ways of working, learn from them, leverage across different projects, both in my work projects as well as elsewhere. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

In terms of how you bring your project management skills to bear as a volunteer, I’m interested in how you sort of think about how you can add value to a group, but that looks different from PMI than, you know, to use Lebo’s church example, you’re probably not going to be dropping stand-ups and KPIs on those groups. How have you figured out how to bring your project management skills to bear in volunteer contexts?

PRIYA PATRA 

I connect with many social impact organizations. We go there and we help them to design their projects, their project plan. They needed help with reporting to get funding. For example, you create a business case when you go for funding for a project. That’s exactly the same thing that we go and teach them there. Collaborate with them or co-create the business plan with them. That’s how I have leveraged my work experience as a project manager and help[ed] these social impact organizations to move forward in getting funding, in leveraging the network. How do we leverage our LinkedIn connects, et cetera, for getting donations, funding for orphanages, for donation of books, et cetera? How do you plan that project? So that’s the learning that we took from our workplace across to those organizations. 

LEBOGANG NGOATO 

Priya is correct, and I want to add on to that. In [the] South Africa PMI Chapter, we work with orphanages a lot. During COVID, we identified one of the orphanages in South Africa, in Jo’burg, that was struggling to go [to] online schooling because they did not have all the opportunities to go out and buy different computers for them to be able to link up via the internet. We just went online, and we reached out to the corporates, and we told them about the project that we were doing, which was an orphanage, Home of Hope for Girls. It’s a home with 90 girls who don’t have parents. And all we did is we became a conduit. We asked for 90 computers with internet, and they gave us the computers. We took the computers to the orphanage. We connected those 90 girls to their schools so that they can continue with online schooling during COVID. 

And it’s exactly what we do with our skills. The community out there [has] needs, but they may not have the skills to go out and solicit what they need. So we [came] in and we said, “Okay, let me show you how to do a proposal. Let me show you how to do a business case. Let me show you how to do this. Let’s go out, let’s go look for funding.” And most of the time we succeed, and that’s how we translate the skill that we have to impact the local community where we live. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Silvana, you’re coming at this from a different angle in that volunteering is helping you develop your skills as a project professional. Can you share a volunteer project that has helped you further build your project management skill set? 

SILVANA TOVAR

I’m the leader of a project in PMI São Paulo that I’m really proud of. This year was the second edition, and it’s the Social Language Project. We meet on a weekly basis to talk about project management in English. Just to give you some data, in Brazil only 5% [of people] speak English, and out of those 5%, only 1% are fluent. We know that one of the universal languages is English, so you need to have it to be able to communicate properly. And as we know, communication is essential to do our job as project managers. So we did a program of 12 weeks in which we had a meeting every week to talk about a specific topic in English about project management.

What I love about this project is that it offers a safe environment for you to develop your skills without fear and without being embarrassed of [making] a mistake or anything. You’re learning new things about project management, and you have the opportunity to interact with other people from other countries even. And you’re improving your English-speaking skills and listening skills. This project earned an award last year of LATAM Excellence Awards. My goal this year and next one, it’s to try to replicate this project to other PMI chapters. It’s a very simple project, but it’s very beneficial for the community.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

That’s great. Now Lebo and Priya, I want to ask how has your volunteer experience helped each of you grow as a project professional?

LEBOGANG NGOATO

Confidence really helped me a lot. I’m a very shy person. I know it’s hard to believe. But when I started to volunteer, I started speaking in front of a large number of people. The first time it was difficult, but the second time it was better. I started going into the social impact regional advisor role—looking after not just the South Africa Chapter, but about 15 other chapters—I was forced to also present at the leadership meetings on what are we doing as the region from a social impact perspective. I found that doing that multiple times has really, really helped me to be comfortable with myself at work when I speak to anybody.

You can imagine if you speak with a big number of people somewhere else, and you have to go back to work and you have to speak to the executives, it became so much easier to do. One thing about PMI is that you always learn new things, new terminology, and some of the stuff you hear at the conferences, and you come to work and introduce those concepts at work. In a sense, I’m a step ahead. And that also gives you additional confidence because some people are still learning about those new ways of doing things.

PRIYA PATRA

I concur with what Lebo is saying. I was a backbencher myself for many, many years. I would have never, ever thought in my wildest dream to speak in a PMI Global conference to an international stage. But this volunteering actually opened up those opportunities. When I went to the global congress for the first time in 2015 in Florida, I attended a few sessions, and that gave me a bit of confidence: “If these people can go up on the stage and speak, why can’t I? Why can’t I share my knowledge?”

Apart from that, I’ve been able to improve my cultural agility, I will say. As a project manager today, it is very important that we understand how to work across cultures. And I believe that these volunteering projects have helped me to develop that cultural quotient that we are talking about. Working with remote teams, diverse teams, in addition to this, leading any global initiative within the organizations, I do have the confidence to lead that right now.

Last but not the least, leading volunteer teams is definitely not the same as leading your project teams. When I’m leading volunteer teams, I always think, “What is that ‘why,’ right?” So why are you volunteering? And I always think, “Am I able to provide that similar ‘why’ to my volunteer teams?” Because volunteers will definitely need to be constantly motivated and see [the] value proposition in the projects that they are working on. While articulating those value propositions, I’m able to articulate value propositions for any project that I am working on in my workplace as well. This is how I’m able to keep my team motivated, look at the larger picture. It’s how you’re solving a business problem: What is the value that you’re bringing to your customers? I think I know how to articulate that value because I’ve been doing this with my volunteer teams all the while.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Are there any questions that you have for one another?

SILVANA TOVAR

I think Priya just read my mind because she just answered the question I was going [to] ask. I was going to ask about motivation. Everybody’s here volunteering; nobody’s getting paid to do so. When you work with projects like at your job and everything, your company, even if people don’t have the passion, they’re getting paid to do that job. For us who are all volunteering, it’s very difficult to navigate towards motivating your team and keep them motivated so the project doesn’t stop in the middle of it. I would love to hear from Lebo. How do you keep your team motivated when everybody there is a volunteer?

LEBOGANG NGOATO

One of the reasons why you volunteer is that when you go for that dream job, when your CV lands on the table, it must be different from all the other CVs. You must have gone beyond and done something better than all the others, because it has worked for me. They looked at my CV, they looked at all my volunteer experiences in the different roles, and my peers have not done that. Therefore, especially when you belong to PMI in a project management professional organization, it’s just a plus for the organization. For you to move from one point to another point, organizations are looking for people that are well-rounded, that are not just focusing on one thing at a time, and that will take you places. Giving back goes a long way.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Let’s expand on that motivation piece—what would be your top piece of advice to other project professionals who are considering volunteering?

SILVANA TOVAR

Just be honest about why you’re volunteering—what’s your objective, your expectations, and what’s the time available that you can give. The local chapter [has] some problems with some projects because people get demotivated, and they just simply abandon the project in the middle. In the Social Language Project, I had two team members and one of them said, “I just got this new job. I need to focus on that a little bit more, but I still want to work in the team and volunteer.” So I already knew what the expectation was, what her time available was. 

LEBOGANG NGOATO

Take the knowledge that you have, the learnings that you have experienced and share it with the world. You can start with a local chapter and then grow and start presenting your knowledge to the world. I was thinking of doing [this] in the past is how do you guide those potential volunteers to package this together and start presenting it to the outside world? I think that could also encourage a lot of people to come out and be part of the volunteer community and give back as well.

PRIYA PATRA

For me, it’s always keeping an open mind and connecting with diverse people like Lebo, like Silvana, and learning from them. And I believe that really makes a difference. So as a volunteer, keep an open mind, connect with different people from different backgrounds, learn from them. It will definitely create a difference.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Everybody, this has been fantastic. Let’s close out with one final question—what’s the one thing that you find the most exciting about volunteering? Or what do you think someone on the fence about jumping in might find the most rewarding?

SILVANA TOVAR

For me, the best part of volunteering is, at least in PMI São Paulo, that we have all the structure, all the support we need to make the initiative a reality. We have a safe environment to develop our skills, be creative, and just come up with ideas and then gather together and make them a reality. The leaders of my chapter and the structure we have allow us to do that. It’s the most fun and the best part of volunteering—having that space to create, to just bring an idea and do it with a group of people and be safe to make mistakes as well.

PRIYA PATRA

For a volunteer who is on the fence, right, and is considering volunteering, I would try to talk about the benefits of volunteering and how it has changed my life. And how I’ve been able to hone my leadership skills and take it to the next level. I believe that I’ve experienced “volunesia,” that moment in your life where you forget you’re volunteering because it has changed your own life. So I would probably narrate what I have gained from volunteering.

LEBOGANG NGOATO 

For me, besides all the networking and all the other stuff, it’s traveling. I love traveling, and PMI has allowed me to travel to different countries around the world and [interact] with different cultures. What I do is, after a week of attending the conference, I take another week off and see the different country. I don’t think I would have seen the number of countries that I’ve seen since I started volunteering in PMI. And there’s not many organizations that are like this.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Thanks so much, everyone. This has been a great conversation. 

LEBOGANG NGOATO 

Thanks, Steve.

SILVANA TOVAR 

Thank you, Steve.

PRIYA PATRA

Thank you for inviting us.

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Thanks for listening to Projectified®. If you like what you heard, you can listen to more episodes on your preferred podcast platform or visit PMI.org/podcast. And please subscribe to the show and leave a rating or review—it’s always great to hear from you. Hope you can join us next episode!