By Franz Paasche, SVP, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer
In 2022, PayPal’s global employee community made lasting social impact in communities around the world. More than 19,000 of our employees participated in Community Impact activities that reached more than 4,400 nonprofits. Together, we contributed nearly 100,000 volunteer hours, including more than 45,000 skills-based volunteering hours. PayPal employees also donated generously to causes they care about and supported our mission by helping to select more than 70 nonprofits to receive place-based Community Impact grants.
Volunteerism is increasingly an integral part of our employee culture at PayPal. It enhances our connection to our mission, to one another, and our communities. In today's flexible work environment, volunteer activities help bring us together, creating opportunities for teams to meet and collaborate (whether virtually or in person) and build relationships with each other and the communities we serve. On Martin Luther King Day this year, members of our Amplify employee resource group came together to pay tribute to Martin Luther King’s legacy through a day of service. In Austin, colleagues packed more than 160 pallets of food for clients of the Central Texas Food Bank.
Creating economic opportunity for all is key to our mission and is a driving force for how we serve our nonprofit partners. Our employee community is essential to furthering our mission, vision and values. In 2022, we came together to:
- Mentor entrepreneurs: With our partners, including Black Girl Ventures and Start Small Think Big, we mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs to help scale their businesses.
- Prepare tomorrow’s tech professionals and entrepreneurs: PayPal’s support of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship helped prepare more than 36,000 young people from historically excluded communities for career success, and included coaching and mentorship from employee volunteers.
- Build nonprofits’ capacity: Through our skills-based volunteering programs and partnerships with organizations like Taproot Foundation, employees used their expertise to help nonprofits develop and strengthen their infrastructure to better serve our communities.
Our employees also dedicated time and resources to protect the planet. We worked together to:
- Beautify community areas: Employees connected with each other and their communities through site and team-based, in-person and virtual volunteer efforts. As part of the program, more than 450 employees from India gathered in locations across Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad to paint murals at local government schools as part of a paint-a-thon beautification initiative called “Art, Heartfully.”
- Rejuvenate nature: Colleagues in many of our global PayPal communities came together with their colleagues, friends, and families to plant trees, clean up public spaces and plant gardens.
- Reduce ecological impacts: Employees took part in learning and action opportunities to save energy, conserve resources, and participate in environmental actions big and small – collectively contributing more than 20,000 acts of environmental sustainability.
These are just a few of the countless examples of how the members of our PayPal community generated enduring impact within the communities where we live and work. This spirit of generosity and commitment to expanding economic opportunity and furthering financial health is a source of pride for all of us at PayPal. We look forward to inspiring and enabling the PayPal employee community to continue to make a difference in 2023.