A partnership educational initiative in the field of corporate volunteering has been successfully implemented by the Center for Corporate Social Responsibility of the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg University. The initiative is based on the video course "Corporate Volunteering", prepared by the Director of the Center, Yury Blagov, with the support of the National Council on Corporate Volunteering (NCCV).

In the fall semester of the 2024/25 academic year, interested third-year students of the GSOM SPbU bachelor's degree programs completed the online training in a new optional discipline "Corporate Volunteering", which combined the completion of a video course with work on group projects for leading Russian companies - members of the NCCV. A similar educational track was also offered to undergraduate and graduate students of the Institute of Economics, Public Administration and Finance of the Siberian Federal University (SFU). Thus, 47 students from partner universities completed the training. Managers from BIOCAD, Energy of Development of the State Corporation Rosatom, Gazprom Neft, Metalloinvest, Mobius Technologies, Norilsk Nickel, Severstal, as well as representatives of the NCCV took part in the work on the projects.

The final part of the training was the defense of twelve group projects, which took place on December 13 in Krasnoyarsk and December 16 in St. Petersburg. In addition to grades for completing the course, the students received certificates from GSOM SPbU and NCCV.

In 2025, the project will be scaled up: an extended version of the video course "Corporate Volunteering" will be prepared in cooperation with the Center for the Development of Electronic Educational Resources of SPbU for the Open Education platform. At the same time, the optional course that successfully passed the testing will continue to be taught both at GSOM SPbU and at partner universities with the support of the NCCV. The CSR Center also plans to hold a national case championship on corporate volunteering.

It should be noted that corporate volunteering is one of the main areas of activity of the of the Center for CSR, developed in partnership with the NCCV. In November, Yury Blagov, Director of the Center, took part in the XIII Moscow International Forum "Corporate Volunteering: Business and Society" as a moderator of the session "Volunteering and Business Processes: A New Approach to Business Sustainability". In his speech, he noted:

  
"Today, corporate volunteering is objectively turning into a complex business process aimed at achieving a number of interrelated goals and implying effective interaction of several management functions."