As part of the fourth annual UPS Global Volunteer Week, UPS employees donated their time and talents to help local communities by taking on such tasks as repairing schools and reading to children to assisting food banks and landscaping for community organizations. The effort extended from Asia and Latin America to the United States and Europe.
In the UAE, UPS partnered with the International Association of Human Values (IAHV) to support their ‘It’s cool to be safe’ campaign, an initiative aimed to raise awareness on safe driving habits especially among younger drivers who statistically account for the highest percentage of deaths and serious injuries on Dubai roads.
For this campaign, IAHV designed 100,000 ‘It’s cool to be safe’ car stickers to be handed out by IAHV volunteers to car owners in the Emirates. The owners were required to sign these stickers before sticking them on their windscreen, as a pledge to be a safer driver.
More than 40 UPS employees gathered at CentrePoint in the Mall of the Emirates to hand-out these stickers and brochures to shoppers at the mall and educate them on the importance of driving within the speed limit, wearing a seat belt and following traffic rules at all times.
“Considering the rise in fatalities that take place on Dubai roads on a daily basis, a road safety awareness drive is the need of the hour. To support this issue, UPS staff volunteered with the IAHV team to educate the general public on being responsible and vigilant drivers,” said John Tansey, Country Manager, UPS UAE LLC.
UPS’s Global Volunteer Week is an extension of the company’s long-standing commitment to volunteerism and marks the culmination of volunteer work performed by employees all year long through UPS’s global volunteer program, Neighbor to Neighbor.
“UPS delivers packages to doorsteps and a helping hand to local communities,” said UPS Chairman and CEO Mike Eskew, who led a walk for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Atlanta. “Our employees are good neighbors and Global Volunteer Week reinforces our legacy of volunteerism.”
Since 2003, the week-long community service initiative has grown from roughly 1,000 volunteers in 2003 to more than 20,000 employees expected to participate worldwide this year.
Local UPS employees choose their own Global Volunteer Week projects because employees best understand the needs in their own communities. The program this year will include volunteer efforts such as:
• More than 500 hours coordinating a baseball tournament for blind and visually impaired children in Taiwan.
• Nearly 2,000 hours renovating schools and shelters in Germany.
• An estimated 6,500 hours across the United States providing logistics support for the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure fundraising walks for breast cancer research.
• And more than 100 hours sorting food for food banks in Montreal Canada.
