What: Carla Villoria and Alan Krumholz: Impact Sourcing – changing the role of disadvantaged youth in the global economy.

Please join us Tuesday for another exciting Change Seminar. Carla Villoria and Alan Krumholz will be joining us to talk about their Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC) entry and their efforts to expand it beyond to the competition to Microsoft.

Industry trends show that a growing number of companies are searching for socially responsible services while still achieving efficiency and cost advantage. Impact Sourcing, a social-driven outsourcing approach to Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) focuses on employing the poor and vulnerable. While still relatively new, with approximately 144,000 workers and a market size of about $4.5 billion, Impact Sourcing is an exciting, emerging space expected to reach $20 billion by 2016 and employ 1.4 million underprivileged workers worldwide.

Carla and Alan are very passionate about this topic and became finalists with their GSEC entry to bring impact sourcing to Mexico. They also lead a grassroots initiative to bring the impact sourcing model to Microsoft on a large scale. They have partnered with the citizenship office and global procurement to drive the concept forward. They are currently in conversations with various business groups at Microsoft and some impact sourcing organizations to find outsourcing opportunities for this model.

Please join us to hear about their business proposal as well as their journey to bring this model to Microsoft.

Carla Villoria was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela until she was 20 years old and migrated to U.S. due to political issues in her home country. She graduated with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Business from Texas A&M University, and became a full-time employee at Microsoft Corporate Headquarters in July 2011, where she works today. She joined the company as part of a rotational program for which she completed four 6-month rotations across the company – she worked as a technical project manager of security tools, developed the Microsoft IT strategy and the CIO scorecard, was an analyst in the Finance World Wide Organization in Munich Germany, and worked as a Quality & Business Excellence consultant. She is currently a Solution Manager in the Modern IT team, driving the implementation of a company-wide work stream to increase adoption of digital productivity. Carla recently started pursuing an Executive Masters in Public Administration from the Evans School at the University of Washington.

Alan Krumholz was born and raised in Mexico City and graduated with a Computer Science degree from Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. He has worked for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Oracle’s special projects group, and then joined Microsoft as part of the accelerated professional experiences rotational program. He had the opportunity to work as a software engineer for the Product Activation, Global Strategic Initiatives, and Windows Phone teams before changing his career path and becoming a data scientist. He currently works for the Microsoft’s Data and Decision Sciences group, a team that provides advanced analytic consulting services to very diverse internal and external clients. He serves the team as a subject matter expert in Machine Learning, Big Data, Statistical Modeling, Natural Language Processing, and Software Development. Alan is half-way through a Professional Computer Science Masters at the University of Washington.

Carla and Alan are intrapeneurs at Microsoft. Together, they have put in place many internal programs related to corporate citizenship and philanthropy, and have a great established relationship with the Citizenship team at Microsoft as well as other citizenship-related teams around the company.

Some of the initiative they have driven together are the following:

Drive the implementation of the Leaders in Action program, from ideation to execution, for the Microsoft IT organization (4,000 people). A program to build leadership, collaboration, and innovation skills in employees by empowering them to drive change through impactful social development projects. Essentially giving employees the opportunity to spend 15% of their time working in social good projects with non-profits around the world. Three pilot projects will kick off in July 2014.
Implemented the Microsoft Ambassadors Program to improve the current volunteer efforts of employees and better support nonprofits all over the world
Drove the end-to-end implementation and deployment of the Explore Program, an initiative for rotational program members to dedicate 20 business days out of a 6 month period to social good projects outside of their rotation work. The program kicked off in July 2013 and 10% of members signed up for projects, half with local nonprofits and the other half went to work on projects in Kenya with an internal initiative called 4Afrika.
Assisted the Microsoft 4Afrika initiative shape their company-wide volunteer program, and volunteer with them to deliver project management and business intelligence trainings in Nigeria.
Members of the leadership team for the Net Impact Microsoft corporate chapter