Today is Levi Strauss & Co.’s Community Day, a global day of giving back in which more than 5,000 employees around the world get out of the office to volunteer in their communities.
This year, our activities in our San Francisco-based headquarters are focused on a community that is particularly close to our hearts: Our neighbors in the North Bay who are still reeling from the impacts of the wildfires last October. We stepped up immediately after the fires, donating more than $300,000 to help the most vulnerable, contributing nearly 1,000 hours of employee volunteer time, and by hosting a sample sale that provided more than 1,500 fire victims with free products. While the headlines have moved on, these communities are still grappling with the challenges of recovery and rebuilding – and we want to contribute to those efforts.
That’s why for this year’s Community Day, 900 employees are volunteering at 24 organizations throughout the North Bay, including spending time at schools where many students’ families lost their homes, helping impacted immigrants fill out paperwork to get financial and housing assistance and clearing up open space preserves affected by the fires.
Community Day is a unique opportunity for us to live out our values and give back to the communities where we live and work. The theme of this year’s event is “activism” – because LS&Co. employees don’t just limit their community engagement to just one day, they put their time and money into the causes they care about all year long. In 2017, employees contributed more than 50,000 volunteer hours and almost $600,000 in donations to making the world a better place.
This past year has served as a powerful reminder that it’s up to each of us to take responsibility for standing up for the values we believe in and creating the kind of world we want to live in. We are proud of the way our employees continuously step up to answer that call. Today, we are excited to come together and celebrate that legacy of giving back that Levi Strauss himself started more than 150 years ago.
