From day one, our mission at Postmates has been to help people unlock the best of their cities. While some companies try to build a warehouse outside of a city and funnel goods into it — we know that our cities, our towns and our communities are our warehouses. A big part of what we do is help local brick and mortar businesses better compete against retail goliaths. But as we’ve grown to operate in more than 250 cities, we now want to re-invest in building a more sustainable future for the communities we serve.
This past summer, we hosted a town hall meeting where we sat down with teams across the company to discuss our core values:
Be eccentric: Do things differently — and better, do them your way. Inspire others to experience a different point of view.
Create things that last: There is incredible value in infrastructure & utilities others can rely on. We liberate people by creating it.
Embrace the new, new: Dream up new ways to see and live the future. Once upon a time, all we do today sounded like science fiction.
Out of many, one: Be aware of the responsibility we have to look out for each other — both within our own Postmates team and the larger world we live in.
Now, we’re taking a big step in fully realizing that last value — “Out of Many, One.”
We’ve recently formed a new team — Civic Labs, a social impact team with the mission to tap into Postmates ingenuity to build a thriving, sustainable future that works for everyone. The team is focused on developing programs and partnerships to promote climate action, food security and local business and independent workforce advocacy.
In addition, we are also dedicating 1% of our collective workforce time to support the communities and causes we care most deeply about. Postmates has joined Pledge 1%, a movement spearheaded by Atlassian, Rally, Salesforce and Tides, which is dedicated to making the community a key stakeholder in every business.
As part of the Postmates Civic Labs efforts and Pledge 1% partnership, teammates can now choose the nonprofit of their choice, and we’ll pay them for their workday — up to 24 hours per year. Postmates full-time employees can use 1% of their workdays days to join one of our company volunteer events — such as our recent community garden harvest or our upcoming project with Open Hand; or employees can volunteer at the local nonprofit that they’re most passionate about.
To kick off our renewed focus on enabling the Postmates community to give back, we were proud to partner with TNDC Tenderloin People’s Garden harvest — to help harvest fresh food for low-income residents in the SF bay area. TNDC Volunteer and Corporate Partnerships Lead Haley Caldwell was equally heartened by the turnout. “I’ve never seen so many people out at that front table before… It was really fun to have Postmates here. It’s not always easy for some volunteers to be in the Tenderloin, but you guys fit right in.”
Josh Phillips, Chief of Staff at Postmates and Civic Labs founder also echoed that sentiment. “Harvesting the Tenderloin People’s Garden was an incredibly rewarding way for our team to serve the community.”
“In addition to providing fresh food to low-income residents in a food desert less than a mile and a half from our office, we got to explore our complicated relationship with food. We spend our lives far removed from the production of what we eat. When you get even just an inch closer you naturally start to ask questions about our food system’s equitability, the impact it has on our health, the role it plays in climate change, and, ultimately, our dependence on others to feed ourselves.”
With Harvest Day down, there’s still more to come for Civic Labs and the volunteers at Postmates. You can find out more about the larger Pledge 1% effort here.
Originally posted: November 28, 2017
