UPS Philippines volunteer efforts advocate sustainability, resilience

MANILA, Philippines - As part of UPS’s 13th annual Global Volunteer Month, over 500 UPS employees across the Philippines contributed more than 4,000 volunteer hours through various activities that contributed to environmental sustainability and building a more resilient community.

Spearheaded by The UPS Foundation, the global philanthropic and corporate citizenship arm of UPS, Global Volunteer Month mobilizes UPS employees around the world to engage in a variety of service activities.

In the Philippines, the volunteer activities include:

• Promoting sustainable agricultural practices through an ongoing arrangement with Sibol ng Agham at Teknolohiya (SIBAT). SIBAT is a local non-governmental and non-profit organization engaged in the promotion and development of appropriate technology for village-level sustainable development in the Philippines. Over 90 UPS employees and their family members learned how to make soap and ointment from plants and herbs, prepared bags of sawdust used to grow mushrooms, and manually harvested and threshed rice at the Mangarita Organic Farm in Capas, Tarlac, a SIBAT technology extension center that provides training to farm technologists and local farmers.

• Conserving the environment through tree-planting activities and clean-up of walk paths in Calijon Falls, Malvar, Batangas. More than 70 UPS employees and their family members volunteered over 800 hours in these activities.

• Building a more resilient community by raising awareness about disaster preparedness in Clark, Pampanga. About 250 UPS employees partnered with Aweca Foundation Inc., to conduct disaster preparedness orientations, relief operations, and feeding programs with the students and families at Sapang Bato and Sitio Target Elementary Schools.

“Creating a sustainable environment and a resilient community requires us to evolve the way we do things. We need to raise awareness to organic farming or sustainable agriculture practices within the community to attain food security without sacrificing the environment,” said Tim Gohoc, managing director of UPS Philippines. “With climate change, we also see more extreme weather conditions, and building disaster preparedness is key to enabling communities to rebound quickly.”

UPS recently became a founding member of IMPACT 2030, a private sector-led global collaboration between the United Nations, the private sector and civil society organizations. IMPACT 2030 aims to mobilize employee volunteers to contribute to the achievement of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The volunteer efforts of UPS Philippines employees during the Global Volunteer Month support IMPACT 2030 as well as UPS’s pledge to complete 20 million hours of global volunteerism by the end of 2020. Since 2011, UPS has contributed more than seven million service hours toward this end.