When it comes to giving back to the community, global logistics company Agility has taken a strategic approach with their social projects.

Instead of just writing out a cheque to a charitable organisation every once in a while, the company is actively encouraging its people to get involved in their communities. “We try to make opportunities available for people to roll up their sleeves and volunteer their time and resources for worthwhile causes,” says Mariam Al-Foudery, Agility’s corporate social responsibility manager. “We believe that as a company, we should not only take community involvement seriously; we should take it personally.” 
Agility chairman and managing director Tarek Sultan is vocal about the importance of giving back to the community. “Global presence brings social responsibilities,” he says. “As we grow as a company, particularly in emerging markets, we can see for ourselves that the scourge of poverty, disease and disasters affects us all.
“No one can afford to ignore these problems – and in fact, we as Agility are in a unique position to help.”
While corporate social responsibility has an immediate impact on people and societies, it can also help the business. “In the last two years, Agility has grown exponentially,” says Al-Foudery. “We have acquired various companies in locations all around the world. Time and time again, we have found that people will come together for a good cause. It helps us forge a common culture.”
Community involvement and volunteerism also motivates and inspires employees. After participating in a beach clean-up in Kuwait, for example, 85 per cent of employees said they felt more enthusiastic about working for Agility after the event.
The company has targeted two strategic priorities for 2007: youth and education and disaster relief. The company sites the fact that over 50 per cent of the world’s population is under the age of 25, that 117 million children are out of school and that 400 million children go hungry each year as important reasons to get involved. 
“When we analysed our donations across the company’s global network, we realised that most of our community- involvement activities had to do with youth and education,” says Deena Al-Shatti, corporate social responsibility coordinator. “It just makes sense; today’s youth is tomorrow’s future.”
The idea of disaster relief was born from a desire to use the company’s core competency in expeditionary logistics to make a difference. “We realised that we could use our knowledge in supply chain management and logistics to assist community partner organisations when natural disasters strike,” points out Frank Clary, who manages Agility’s Humanitarian and Emergency Logistics Programme (HELP).
“We have offices, logistics experts, trucks and warehouses on the ground in 100 countries. In a disaster situation, this infrastructure can help humanitarian organisations deliver relief goods faster and more effectively.” 
In practice, Agility’s community action programme takes several forms. The first is targeted towards employees. The company helps sponsor employee-led social initiatives. Each month, an employee leads a campaign aimed at a major social cause with corporate organisational and financial support.
Past projects include employees in Thailand collecting educational materials (textbooks, dictionaries, etc) and transporting them, free of charge, to underprivileged schools in rural districts.  Agility staff in Dubai organised a toy and relief goods drive to collect items for the ‘All as One’ orphanage in Freetown, Sierra Leon, and shipped a 40-foot container of needed supplies to the country free of charge. The orphanage cares for 75 children affected by the civil war. In the United States, Agility employees helped airlift school kits to Kabul, Afghanistan, for the charity Solace International to use in girls’ schools. 
Agility has also gotten actively involved in a number of humanitarian relief operations. For example, during the Lebanon crisis in June of 2006, Agility moved 45 truckloads of food, blankets and medical equipment into Beirut on behalf of local Red Cross/Red Crescent societies. The goods were moved into Lebanon during the height of the bombing and immediately after the ceasefire, with a view to helping the 800,000 people displaced by the conflict.
Most recently, Agility employees responded to the floods in Indonesia in January, 2007, which left 40 per cent of Jakarta under water within the first few days of torrential storms. Within 72 hours, Agility got to work. The company partnered with the World Food Programme, one of their long-term customers, to help deliver enough food to feed over 40,000 people for one month.
In 2006, Agility gave over $4 million in a mixture of financial and in-kind contributions to twenty different non-profit organisations worldwide. The contributions helped fund cancer treatments for children in Lebanon, put books in underprivileged schools in Zambia, and set-up primary health care clinics for children in refugee camps in Darfur, Sudan.
“But that is only a start,” says Al-Foudery. “We have 450 offices in 100 countries around the world. Our vision is to see our people getting involved in every single one of those communities. We really believe that individual desire to give back, combined with corporate support, can in fact make a tangible difference in our world.”