On smart volunteering: the Vera Ryabova story

10 march 2023

SIBUR has been actively pursuing the cause of smart volunteering that is forging a community of people who care and who are willing to provide their gratuitous assistance by sharing their knowledge, skills, and experience. SIBUR's smart volunteers perform their assignments using the ProCharity platform that has been joined by over 790 non-profit organizations and over 4,000 volunteers.

Vera Ryabova, an intern with SIBUR’s Corporate Governance function, is discussing her experience of being involved in smart volunteering:

"I first learned about smart volunteering from the book titled "How We Built the Best Legal Department" written by our SIBUR colleagues. I found their idea to be to my liking and I signed up as a ProCharity member during my very first days with SIBUR and immediately started looking for an assignment.

My very first job was to translate a presentation for the Professional Initiatives Development Foundation, "Women of the Nuclear Industry”. I was tasked to translate from English into Russian a 20-slide presentation about an international organization that unites experts in the area of nuclear technologies and all people who follow developments in the atomic industry.

The Foundation had uploaded the presentation that needed to be translated to ProCharity in advance, so that one could take a look at it prior to accepting the job in order to assess the text’s volume and the complexity of its language. If you had any questions, you could get them quickly answered by working through the Foundation’s representative who was always available, responded to all queries by promptly using the platform’s chat function, and shared their contact details.

In the course of performing this assignment, I was able to not only improve my English language skills, but also learned quite a lot of new things such as that the IAEA has in place a gender-friendly policy that includes various measures of support for women ranging from individual scholarships to "pre-booking" job placements.

I enjoyed using the ProCharity platform. At the January webinar on smart volunteering at SIBUR I was given an extra boost of motivation and decided to take on another assignment posted by the same Foundation: this time I had to translate 3 interviews from Russian into English. By then, I had already had some experience working with this organization, and the feedback I got and my own impressions of this interaction had been nothing but positive. Once again, the Foundation was pleased with the quality of my work.

When I later responded to the Foundation's translation assignment for the third time, there had already been several more volunteers’ applications for the same gig. I was very proud to get selected by the Foundation yet another time!

Smart volunteering helps broaden one's horizons, offers an opportunity to "take one’s mind off" their core responsibilities at work and develop additional skills, while also giving one a boost of positive emotional energy: it feels really great to hear words of thanks from these charitable foundations".