Key Takeaways: Purpose with Impact – Driving Sustainable Business & Social Change

Explore how purpose-driven initiatives and CSR create lasting business and social impact through governance, mentorship, education, and innovation in 2025.

The “Purpose with Impact” panel featured highly regarded leaders with diverse backgrounds to discuss how a purpose permeates strategy and culture in an organization. It creates significant and worthwhile business and social value. Their experiences in governance, CSR, communications, and education made it possible for them to tell inspiring stories together with real impact, highlighting that purpose is not an abstract ideal.

Veena Iyer spoke about governance frameworks impact for thousands of employees in different countries, highlighting how CSR can be transparent and ethically sound. Her team developed processes for selecting NGOs and projects, describing how corporations can transcend beyond “motherhood statements” to achieving change. She described impact accountability frameworks in projects like the lake restoration in Bangalore, detailing how funds were channeled to generate value and underwent independent audits for years to confirm the promised benefits were realized. In closing, she stated that impact, “measure what matters”.

Sherin Ali shared the story of her personal project of teaching four children at her home which grew into the initiative of educating more than 50 underprivileged children. This initiative educated her to lead the WNS CSR initiatives. Her story illustrates how actions fueled by empathy can scale to influence large organizations and create greater social impact. From her story, it is clear that purpose-driven work is most productive and impactful when it is fueled by deep passion, with clear, authentic, and directed navigation towards the end goal.

Rajeev Taneja, the Operating Officer at Honda India Foundation, has shown how CSR is most effective when it is fully embraced and embedded into the company’s core. Honda’s philosophy of mobility with safety emphasizes the CSR focus on road safety, allocating significant funding to that area. Honda does not stop at awareness campaigns but focuses on long-term infrastructure and works closely with government agencies. From Rajeev’s words, businesses need to tackle the challenge of sustainable long-term systemic change, while adding short-term visibility, using targeted local initiatives, such as no-fatality zones, to drive sustained focus on incremental enhancement.

Pragati Chavan explained the Phyllis India project which is a year-long mentorship program designed to help women leaders reframe workplace narratives and overcome barriers such as imposter syndrome. The program aims to address the mid-career drop-off in women workforce participation by building and nurturing resilience and confidence. Pragati’s reflections demonstrate the extent to which intentional mentorship can catalyze culture change and enhance gender diversity within organizations, showcasing the linkage between personal and collective change.

Veena talked about ISR (Institutional Social Responsibility) related to education, where subjects such as patriotism, climate change, and disaster preparedness are integrated with basic education. This ISR focuses on empowering the tribal and rural areas through education and skill development, showcasing how education for social responsibility supports nation-building and social unity.

Sherin showcased a novel initiative where over 7 million children are certified as “cyber smart,” which includes teaching them cyber security and financial literacy through gamified learning modules. This initiative exemplifies the fulfillment of purpose-driven education on a multi-dimensional scale, equipping the young learners with the skills to face emerging challenges.

The discussion reinforced that embedding purpose within governance, operations, communications, and culture holistically drives sustainable impact. Be it lake restoration, child education, road safety advocacy, women leader mentorship, or educational innovation, these actions highlight the need for measuring and authenticating actions and intent. Impact driven purpose means enabling change that profoundly touches lives while reinforcing organizational and societal trust and integrity. Such forward looking businesses and institutions must embrace this paradigm. Purpose-driven, forward looking businesses and institutions must embrace this paradigm.

The insightful panel also showcased that purpose, vision, and commitment serve as the powerful foundation for collective good that businesses and institutions seek to achieve and sustainably impact far beyond profit margins.

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