UPS loves logistics; UNICEF loves UPS!

Josh Harvey is on the Private Sector Partnerships team at the U.S. Fund.

Sometimes, we at the U.S. Fund find ourselves in awe of our partners. With UPS, this is an everyday occurrence.

A friend of the U.S. Fund for over a decade, UPS has provided generous support to UNICEF programs the world over. But UPS’s commitment to the world’s children goes even further; indeed, UPS and UNICEF’s collaboration may well represent the future of partnerships between the private sector and the NGO world.

Even as I write, UPS logistics experts are working hand-in-hand with UNICEF Supply Division in Copenhagen to improve UNICEF’s impressive supply and logistics capacity. UPS staff lent to UNICEF are bringing UPS’s unparalleled expertise in logistics to UNICEF’s life-saving work, helping UNICEF staff figure out how best to manage the nearly $110 million in supplies in our Copenhagen warehouse (which covers over three football fields!), and how best to distribute to regional warehouses and country offices the nearly $2 billion (!) in supplies UNICEF procures annually.

Expertise-sharing partnerships, where companies leverage their core competencies to improve non-profit’s capacity, are the cutting edge in private sector-NGO cooperation, and are proving to be one of the most innovative and impactful ways in which the private sector can support NGO work. Expertise sharing results in lasting improvements to efficiency and effectiveness, which in turn helps UNICEF better deliver for the world’s children.

We’re grateful to UPS for embarking on this innovative initiative with UNICEF, and are thrilled to see the good we can do together when we bring our most valuable resources – our people – together!

(P.S. check out Supply Division’s website – http://www.unicef.org/supply/ these folks are amazing, overseeing almost $2 billion in supplies, 10,000 sea and air shipments annually, and packing and shipping emergency supplies to anywhere in the world within 48 hours!)