Amazon hosts second nonprofit expo

This week we welcomed sixty local nonprofits to our Seattle headquarters for our second Nonprofit Expo. Our goal for this event is to further strengthen relationships between Amazon employees and some of the many nonprofit organizations in the Seattle area, because we believe deeper collaboration will help make our community even stronger.

For this event, we highlighted nonprofits that focus on housing stability/homelessness, STEM and literacy education. As you see in our partnerships with Mary’s Place and FareStart, assuring women, children, and families have stable housing is very important to us. STEM is of course stitched into the fabric of everything we do here at Amazon, and literacy relates back to our roots as an online bookstore.

Amazonians bring not only invention, efficiency, scale, and speed, but also passion. We were excited for our employees to explore new ways to engage with each other and the community, including signing up for specific volunteer opportunities with the attending nonprofits. And we also wanted the nonprofits to learn about how Amazonians think and work so together they can identify some peculiar ways to advance their important missions.

Our entire community will be better when more families are stably housed, more students have access to STEM education, and more children can grow up as readers. This possibility drives us to strengthen relationships with local nonprofits.

Our event partners, The Seattle Foundation, greeted Amazonians to educate them about impactful philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, and teams from Amazon Pay and Amazon Smile were in attendance to talk to the nonprofit representatives about how to best use those services.

It was energizing to see Amazonians initiating or strengthening relationships with local nonprofit organizations. I cannot wait to see all the ways we’ll work together to benefit more children and families in the Seattle area.