Volunteering & Community

Arriving in Delhi by night doesn’t give you a true sense of the city’s vastness. The low hum of hundreds of taxis whizzing around the airport terminal and the dirt kicked up from the wheels of 11:00 p.m. traffic blur the senses. But when morning came, and I saw the prim, gleaming hotels and office buildings of Gurgaon rise from a sprawling landscape of poverty and poke through the hazy, brown-grey horizon line, a clearer picture of India emerged.

This holiday season, global outdoor lifestyle brand Timberland is focused not only on equipping shoppers with the latest in cold weather gear, but also with serving those in the community who are less fortunate. With the message “Made to Give” appearing in stores across the U.S., the brand engaged both employees and consumers in a variety of efforts to support communities in need.

This time of year, our thoughts are often full of colorfully-wrapped gift bags or boxes with big bright bows. While the holiday season is a special time for giving, we are thankful as well for the opportunity to strengthen lives and communities all year long. Whether through mentoring students, teaching digital skills that lead to higher-paying jobs, or supporting entrepreneurs working to make a difference in their community, our employees and our thousands of nonprofit partners are improving lives every day.

As a young child, Peter Krohn experienced the horrors of the Holocaust. During an inspection, Nazis suspected his favorite teddy bear was being used to smuggle money and destroyed it. Nearly 80 years later, he found a replica of the same toy on eBay. Learn how it's enabling him to share his family’s story of survival with others, and in the process helping teach acceptance and love to younger generations.

A nurse and ten families affected by the recent California Wildfires received a special Christmas surprise, thanks to Walmart and the Today Show.

During 2017, AT&T’s long-standing culture of service and volunteerism has been highly visible across the nation with employees coming together to support communities affected by disasters and in need in Houston, Texas, Puerto Rico, California and many other regions. As an AT&T employee, and National President for HACEMOS, our company’s Latino focused employee resource group, I recently had the opportunity to serve alongside my colleagues from more than a dozen countries in a transformative project showing that our company’s spirt of service is also truly global.

This holiday season, we’re spotlighting May Chen, one of our inspiring employee volunteers from Fidelity Investments. May has now volunteered on two skills-based volunteering projects, where she helped develop a Salesforce community application for Citizen Schools and an IT assessment and strategic roadmap with Metrocrest Services. Throughout both projects, May has been an incredible team player and is extremely dedicated to developing the most effective deliverable for her nonprofit partners.

Two decades after pioneering the sustainability reporting process in 1997, GRI is now the world's established pre-eminent sustainability standard setter. Through 20 years of work that has defined the reporting landscape, we have evolved our reporting framework in line with the collective understanding of sustainability, to incorporate new topics and best practices as they emerge.

Dole Food Company and Fair Trade USA jointly announced today the inauguration of two new community centers near Dole’s Muelle and Bosque Farms in Costa Rica, made possible by Fair Trade purchases made at Whole Foods Market stores, which drive additional money to pineapple farmworkers to invest in projects of their choosing.