Definition
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
Explained by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy
So, I think of this leadership principle as largely being great community members in the narrow and broad communities in which we reside. And we have to keep asking ourselves constantly whether the communities in which we reside are better off because we’re there. And if they’re not, then we need to take action about that.
And it’s not just the jobs that we bring—we bring a lot of jobs to a lot of communities—but it’s also the other contributions to the fabric of those communities. Things like affordable housing, where we’ve invested over $1.8 billion in affordable housing in the Puget Sound area or the Arlington, Virginia area or the Nashville area.
Or helping with the unhoused challenges we have in a lot of our cities. If you look in the Puget Sound area with our partnership with Mary’s Place, I think we’re the only corporation or company that I know that houses families in our corporate buildings. We have over 200 family members housed overnight every night in our buildings and over 1,000 family members a year.
It’s also helping with food security. We’ve partnered with 35 different cities to serve over 10 million free meals to over 80,000 families in need.
It’s helping with education. Our philanthropic educational efforts have impacted over 3.9 million people in 9 countries in the past year.
And our Amazon Future Engineer program has committed $16 million in over 400 scholarships to students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to go to college and pursue a career in technology.
Or how we use what we can uniquely do to help with world crises. If you think about natural disasters, we’ve delivered over 23 million relief items in 44 unique incidents in this past year.
These are all things that we’ve done across the company to try and be better community partners. Over 150,000 Amazonians in this last year have volunteered in efforts that we worked on together. So, we’ve always had a lot of individuals across the company who’ve given back to their communities.
As a company, we waited for several years until we were profitable to be more involved in our communities. But if you look at the last number of years, we have really changed how we interact with communities, including being the top company giver to the Puget Sound area for the last couple of years.