Amazon on Monday announced a $1.7 million donation to Seattle Public Schools and Bellevue School District to assist families in the company’s home region who are struggling to meet basic needs including food, clothing, rent and transportation.
The gift follows Amazon’s efforts this summer to deliver essential supplies to Maui after wildfires that razed the town of Lahaina, and builds on regional events that connected low-income kids with back-to-school supplies.
These recent charitable acts aren’t giant headline grabbing events, but taken together demonstrate Amazon’s evolving identity as a corporation that is engaged in philanthropy and civic issues.
“We’re out there,” said Alice Shobe, global director of Amazon in the Community. “We’re visible and becoming more visible.”
“We’re out there. We’re visible and becoming more visible.”
– Alice Shobe, global director of Amazon in the Community
Shobe, a long-time nonprofit leader with expertise in low-income housing, was hired in 2017 to launch Amazon in the Community, which marked a significant step philanthropically for the company.
The program specifically addresses needs in education, housing, food security, disaster relief and employee volunteering. Some initiatives have a focus on the Seattle area and the company’s other employment hubs, while others are national and international in scope.
During Amazon’s first two decades, the company expanded rapidly and became a huge employer in the Seattle area, where high-paid tech workers further strained a tight housing market. Some civic leaders and residents lamented the company’s absence in addressing the community challenges it was exacerbating.
About a year before Shobe’s hiring, Amazon began amping up its philanthropic role. It partnered with Mary’s Place, a Seattle nonprofit providing shelter for women and children; it hosted its first volunteer expo to connect employees with nonprofits; and it donated funds for a new building for the University of Washington’s Computer Science & Engineering, among other acts.
“There were these pockets of experimentation and investment happening,” Shobe said.
She built on those efforts and incorporated some of Amazon’s technology strengths, such as its last mile infrastructure for quickly moving emergency supplies to disasters, delivering food to hungry families, and providing laptops to schools to meet remote learning needs during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Unlike other corporate philanthropic teams,” she said, “our team is a very technical team.”
And it has grown over time. Amazon in the Community now has more than 100 employees spread across 15 countries.
The program and other charitable efforts have boosted Amazon’s philanthropic image, which was recently burnished by a No. 1 ranking for corporate giving in the Seattle area. In 2021 and 2022, Amazon beat out long-time charitable heavyweights Microsoft and Boeing as the top regional donor, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Last year, Amazon gave $78 million to more than 200 organizations in the area.
The figure, which only represents Amazon’s Seattle-area giving, is still a small sliver of the $134.4 billion in sales Amazon reported in the second quarter of this year alone. But the company has clearly made charitable giving more of a priority.
The new money for students announced Monday will go to Right Now Needs Funds, which Amazon founded with the two school districts. It started the effort in 2018 with the Alliance for Education, which supports Seattle students, and added Bellevue LifeSpring two years later.
The company has donated more than $9.7 million to the two funds with 75,000 mini grants dispersed to families.
“School staff often learn about gaps in support for students but can’t access resources to address them. The Right Now Needs Fund gives them a way to support students and families quickly and effectively,” said Zeynab Abdulgadir, fund director at the Alliance for Education.
Teachers, counselors and principals are responsible for identifying students who will benefit from the fund.
The program is available to all of the schools in the districts, not just those identified as Title I, which directs more federal resources to schools with high percentages of low-income kids. The fund recognizes that even schools with more affluent student bodies still have families who struggle financially, Shobe said.
About half of the money from the funds is used for food, 20% towards clothing, and 30% for a variety of needs.
Over its six years, Amazon in the Community has spearhead multiple efforts, including:
- Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund, which launched in 2021 — a time tech giants were donating funds to support affordable housing in their communities. Amazon has created or preserved more than 5,500 housing units through $549 million in investments in the Seattle area, with additional dollars going to Arlington and Nashville.
- The Amazon Future Engineer program awarded 400 scholarships nationwide in April, with 10 allotted to university and college students in the Seattle area. Each student receives up to $40,000 over four years to study computer science, engineering or related fields, plus a paid internship at Amazon.
- This week, the company is holding multiple Career Discovery Days, inviting 600 middle school kids from the Seattle and Bellevue districts to its campus to talk to Amazon leaders and learn about tech roles.
