U&I is a volunteer-driven charitable organization based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. It provides non-formal education to underprivileged children in 25 cities around India, through a network of over 2,300 volunteers. The casestudy engages with the ways in which conscious design can nurture structures, spaces and processes that enable the integration of an organization’s mission and volunteer model with the leadership’s core principles of empathetic care and authentic relationships. It provides an opportunity for learners to reflect on how designing for empathy can produce tangible programmatic impact, develop in-house leadership and build a self-sustaining organizational culture and volunteer ecosystem.