Global Employee Engagement at FedEx
Originally published in the 2022 FedEx Cares Report
Our team members help bring FedEx Global Citizenship to life. By volunteering their time and talents, employees across the globe enhance our impact beyond what dollars can do alone. We pack Purple Totes, deliver warm winter coats, drive trucks, fly planes, staff civil rights museum events, and advise on public transport routing in the world’s busiest cities. Service is a fundamental aspect of our culture and we are proud of the thousands of employees who took the time to lend a hand to their community in 2022.
Providing food security for vulnerable populations
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported over 33 million people in the U.S. lived in food-insecure households in 2021. We support nonprofits combating food insecurity across the country through charitable grants and FedEx team member volunteering. Here we highlight our work in three major markets.
Colorado Springs
Project Angel Heart Colorado Springs provides medically tailored meals to individuals with severe illnesses such as cancer, heart failure, and HIV/AIDS. The organization aims to deliver comfort and support through high-quality nutrition services and advocates for the principles of “Food is Medicine.”
Atlanta
The Jesse Hill Market in Atlanta partners with the Grady Health System and other community-based organizations to connect the community with fresh and affordable healthy food. FedEx team members volunteer to support the Food as Medicine Fresh Food Cart events held at Grady Health Systems’ neighborhood healthcare centers throughout the city.
South Florida
Meals on Wheels South Florida provides hunger relief services, including home meal delivery of 1.2 million meals annually and grocery shopping assistance, to more than 10,000 seniors in South Florida experiencing food insecurity and isolation. Along with charitable grants, FedEx team members volunteer to prepare, serve, and deliver meals to homebound seniors.
Celebrating Giving Tuesday
In 2022, more than 600 heartfelt nominations were submitted by FedEx team members across the U.S. for the Giving Tuesday Grant Contest. The top three winners, as voted on by team members, are making inspirational impacts in their communities.
1st Place: Puppies Behind Bars received $25,000 to continue training incarcerated individuals to raise service dogs for wounded war veterans and first responders, facility dogs for police departments, and explosive-detec - tion canines for law enforcement.
2nd Place: House of Bread, a nonprofit in Ohio, received $15,000 to support its work serving hot and nutritious lunchtime meals every day of the year. They also serve as a bridge to helpful community resources for families in need.
3rd Place: Foster Love Project was awarded $10,000 to further its mission of showing love in action to children impacted by foster and kinship care through the provision of goods, services, and support. Their largest program is a free Shopping Center for foster youth.
Volunteering inspires our next generation of talent
In 2022, we extended volunteer opportunities to the next generation of hopeful FedEx talent: our interns. In the Memphis area, interns worked on assembling 450 hygiene kits for International Medical Corps to be distributed during disaster or humanitarian relief efforts. Across the US, interns joined a virtual sign-language class and recorded messages of positivity for the deaf community. Whether participating in-person or virtually, 150 interns came together for one common goal: to serve our communities.
Sending holiday care packages to U.S. military service members
To support our troops overseas during the holidays, a team of over 220 FedEx volunteers worked with the USO to assemble 19,240 care packages in under two hours - a record-breaking effort for our team! FedEx has been supporting the USO for over 20 years, providing volunteer efforts, and financial and transportation contributions.
What we are doing back here today is to support them. We appreciate what they are doing. They are putting themselves in harm’s way so we can have the opportunity to do what we do every day.
Brock Carlson
FedEx Logistics Manager and former Marine
Delivering more than warm coats
To a child in need, a warm coat or new pair of sneakers can lead to better school attendance, higher confidence, and new hope. Since 2016, FedEx has supported Operation Warm to deliver new winter coats and athletic-style shoes to over 1.5 million children across North America. In 2022, we expanded to shoe deliveries to support children living in warm weather markets and added a coat delivery in Santiago, Chile. We held 60 events and shipped 18,000 and 6,300 shoes to schools across North America.
Team members volunteer in beach clean-ups across AMEA
An estimated 81% of ocean plastics come from rivers in Asia. To slow the flow of these plastics to the ocean, FedEx teams in the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (AMEA) conduct beach clean-ups. These events are critical for protecting marine biodiversity and mitigating climate change.
More than 455 FedEx volunteers and their family members joined in a pan-AMEA beach cleaning initiative that ran for four months, across 21 beaches in Australia, India, Japan, and Singapore. The volunteers put in a total of 870 hours and removed a massive 142,987kg or 315,401 lbs of garbage and plastic waste from the environment.
Building a sustainable future doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a collective behaviour change. At FedEx, we are not only working hard to achieve our organizational goal of carbon neutral global operations by 2040 but are also actively building meaningful programs to get our employees involved in solving some of the most pressing environmental issues in our society.
Kawal Preet
president of AMEA region at FedEx Express
