Today, we are proud to share that Levi Strauss & Co. has been recognized on Fortune’s 2024 Change the World list, which highlights companies that pursue innovative efforts to address pressing and unmet societal needs.
This year’s Change the World list recognizes LS&Co.’s work leading the Community College Commitment, which is designed to ensure more community college students have access to the resources and tools they need to fully participate in our democracy. You can read more about this work at Fortune.
The Change the World list puts an emphasis on measurable social impact, the value of the initiative to both business and society, and the degree of innovation displayed. We are thrilled to have our work recognized by Fortune on all three counts. As Michelle Gass, LS&Co. president and CEO stated, “The more people can participate in a democracy, the stronger it gets.”
“This year’s edition, our 10th, showcases 52 businesses that continue the Change the World list’s legacy of combining public-spiritedness with the profit motive,” said Matt Heimer, Fortune executive editor for Features. “These companies let their actions speak for themselves — harnessing the creative impulses of capitalism to address social problems and generating revenue while doing so.”
Continuing Our Legacy of Supporting Civic Engagement
LS&Co. has long driven a culture of civic engagement among employees, consumers and young people across the U.S., dating all the way back to 1864 when our founder, Levi Strauss, closed stores on Election Day to ensure that every employee had a chance to vote. More recently, we partnered with Patagonia and PayPal to launch Time to Vote in 2018, an effort designed to guarantee employees get paid time off to vote in elections. The initiative has since grown to include more than 2,000 companies across all 50 states, ensuring millions of hourly workers don’t have to choose between voting and a paycheck.
This year, recognizing a nearly 10% gap in voting rates at two-year schools compared to public four-year colleges, LS&Co. focused on community colleges, encouraging students to register to vote and participate in upcoming elections. Through conversations with key partners, we understood that there was a need for increased funding and focus on these campuses. That’s why we partnered with Lyft and Showtime/MTVEntertainment to launch the Community College Commitment, with a goal of turning out 500,000 new community college voters by 2028.
Tremendous progress has been made since. Just this month, we announced that Lime, Snap Inc., Spotify, TelevisaUnivision and Tony’s Chocolonely have also joined the effort, and last week we helped support voter registration activations on 99 community college campuses in 37 states across the country.
Being recognized on the Fortune Change the World list for this important work is an honor for all of us at LS&Co., and we are proud to have been included five time in the past eight years for initiatives including from our Worker Well-being initiative, our Buy Better, Wear Longer campaign, our gun violence prevention work and our advocacy for a national paid family leave program. It is a legacy very few companies can claim — and one we intend to build on going forward.
