The Enel Group's international program has been converted entirely to an online format.
Among the various projects launched is SOS Mentoring, in support of entrepreneurs whose small businesses have been put in crisis by the pandemic.
Digitalization has played a key role in facing the new challenges causes by the pandemic. At Enel, it has also been fundamental in allowing us to continue our first international corporate volunteering program, Connecting Energies, promoted by Enel green Power. This initiative has become even more important given the great difficulties that many people all over the world are going through due to the arrival of COVID, and today we're happy to tell you about its success.
Connecting Energies was first launched in February 2020 to offer all our colleagues the opportunity to volunteer in some of the countries in which Enel Green Power operates, by making their knowledge and skills available to help local communities. In the finest spirit of corporate volunteering, this program was created with a two-pronged goal: on the one hand, to provide support to people, while on the other, to recognize and enhance the value of our colleagues' interpersonal and professional skills.
Four projects
Although the pandemic imposed an unavoidable suspension, in January 2021 the program was relaunched in digital format. Four projects are up and running so far: SOS Mentoring, supporting young entrepreneurs in Chile, Colombia, Peru and Spain; Educando con Energia, a career guidance program for very young children in Colombia; RenewABLE against Covid, a project focused on designing photovoltaic panels in Kenya and lastly, Digital Literacy to Teachers, an Excel training course. There has been an enthusiastic response from within the company: a great many of our colleagues have signed up to participate in the proposed projects, making their professional skills and their human warmth available to people who need them most.
SOS Mentoring
Of the four initiatives, SOS Mentoring involves the largest number of volunteers: around 100 at present. Launched in partnership with the not-for-profit Youth Business International (YBI), the project offers our colleagues the chance to train as mentors and then immediately afterwards to help young entrepreneurs in Chile, Columbia, Peru and Spain find the right solutions and strategies to relaunch or reinvent their businesses (mostly small stores and commercial ventures) by, for instance, focusing on online commerce and using social media to promote their products, finding new ways of doing business in the process.
'In 2020, because of the pandemic, we realized that vulnerable people had become even more so and even though it wasn't possible to move around because of travel restrictions, communities needed more support than ever. In this new reality, completely changed by COVID, we were forced to innovate, rethinking our daily routine and finding new ways of working. So we decided to also find a new way of virtual volunteering that was suitable for the times we're living in. At the same time, volunteering also provides an important opportunity to develop one's own skills - for example with SOS Mentoring - and to get to know new cultures, by putting the values of solidarity at center stage'.
Giovanni Tula, Head of Sustainability at GPG
'We are thrilled to be partnering with ENEL Group on our SOS Mentoring programme and grateful to ENEL staff for volunteering their time, skills and expertise to support struggling young entrepreneurs in Latin America and Spain to harness their resilience and resourcefulness. Mentoring can be the turning point in someone's life - it can be the difference between business success and failure.'
Anita Tiessen, YBI CEO
Educando con Energia
The Educando con Energia project, created with the Organizacion de Estados Iberoamericanos, involves eight volunteers and aims to offer career guidance to youngsters between the ages of 14 and 17 in state schools in Bogota and Cundinamarca, in Colombia. In this case, the focus is mainly on energy-related professions: our colleagues' role is thus to talk about their own work and their professional experience.
RenewABLE against Covid
The third project, launched at the beginning of 2021, is RenewABLE against Covid, carried out in partnership with Elettrici Senza Frontiere Italia and Fondazione RES4Africa, involving five volunteers with specific engineering skills. The program focuses on providing support to various COVID hospitals in Kenya to design photovoltaic panels that will ensure a constant supply of electricity, which is vital for keeping basic hospital functions running, not least guaranteeing reliable consistent refrigeration to store medicines and vaccines.
Digital Literacy to Teachers
The fourth project, launched in collaboration with United Way, is Digital Literacy to Teachers, with around 20 volunteers helping t0 train various teachers from Columbia's state schools in digital skills as they had been forced to convert their lessons from in-person to online during the pandemic.
Contact:
Tel: +39 06 83051
Email: infoenelgreenpower@enel.com
ENEL S.P.A. 
