At the heart of UPS's philanthropic outreach is the Neighbor to Neighbor program. Through Neighbor to Neighbor, UPS employees organize food drives, work in soup kitchens, mentor troubled youth and help to improve impoverished communities across the U.S. and around the world. UPS’s employees also volunteer their time as members of boards of directors of nonprofit and non-governmental organizations, and lend their considerable expertise to community organizations as well.

This program mobilizes UPS employees and their families to serve as volunteers in their communities. Implemented in Atlanta in 1993, the program provides UPS employees and their families hands-on volunteer opportunities where they live and work and is part of an ongoing company-wide effort to heighten awareness for community needs and promote the importance of volunteerism. The program is administered through each district's "Neighbor to Neighbor Coordinator," a UPS employee whose responsibilities include helping employees find appropriate volunteer opportunities based on their skills, interests and time availability. In 2004, volunteers logged 344,564 hours through the program.

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Serving Communities

Over the course of a given year, thousands of UPSers and family members tutor and mentor youth, plant trees for reforestation projects, sort food at food banks, work with underprivileged children and senior citizens, provide mentoring, help landscape, deliver meals to people with AIDS, build Habitat for Humanity homes for low-income families and volunteer at special-needs sporting events such as the Paralyzed Veterans of America annual Wheelchair Games and the Special Olympics.

Neighbor to Neighbor is managed by The UPS Foundation, which provides financial support to hundreds of nonprofit organizations and community causes. Because of their knowledge of local-level needs, Neighbor to Neighbor volunteers enable The Foundation to learn about nonprofit organizations in need of financial assistance. Likewise, UPSers use their time, talents and compassion to help transform this heartfelt assistance into outcomes that improve the quality of life in our communities.

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Behind the Scenes

As often as not, these efforts are of the behind-the-scenes variety - where hard work makes a tangible difference without making a big splash. One example involves the annual Georgia Special Olympics, which meets over Memorial Day weekend in Atlanta. It was while serving food over the three-day event that a UPS Manager decided it was time to apply UPS's legendary logistics expertise to eliminating the long, slow-moving lines of participants waiting to receive a meal...a problem so acute that it was the most frequent complaint of games-goers.

Today, however, there are no such complaints - thanks to UPS know-how and able company volunteers. Now part of a reliable, routine infrastructure, the weekend meals run so smoothly that they're truly a non-event...which is exactly the way it should be.

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