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Wishes Delivered helps a little entrepreneur combat food insecurity
Young entrepreneur Treandos is inspired.
Not only does he want to make the world a better and more colorful place via the unquestioned magic of the bow tie, he is also combatting a real and persistent issue in many communities … food insecurity.
UPS is working with two local non-profit organizations to upcycle thousands of old uniforms into dog leashes, benefitting programs to provide much-needed homes and jobs for Atlanta-area residents – including some four-legged ones.
United Parcel Service (UPS) is relaxing some of its dress code rules.
Effective immediately, UPS employees will be allowed to wear natural Black hairstyles like Afros, braids, locs and more. The company will also allow facial hair longer than its standard thin mustache-only rule, and it eliminated its gender-based appearance restrictions as well in an effort to give more freedom and flexibility to its employees.
While package handlers have been allowed to wear what they want for years, the impact of easing the restrictions will mostly target public-facing employees of the company like drivers, as well as management and to a certain degree, UPS pilots.
Last week, UPS passed a policy that would allow their employees to wear natural and protective hairstyles. While the public was excited that the people who deliver our packages all across the country could finally feel more comfortable at work, it was also bittersweet. Why was this policy even created in the first place? And why were these rules still on the books in 2020?
I was especially curious to know more about the reaction inside the century-old company, so I connected with a UPS employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation about what it’s like to be a Black person at the company right now.
“It’s like watching a child taking its first steps,” are the words that come to mind when Gordon Reed is asked how he feels about seeing UPS Canada’s largest package sorting and delivery facility up and running. As the director for special projects in UPS’s industrial engineering department, Gordon has spent a lot of work and long hours getting the massive, 850,000 square foot facility in Caledon, Ontario online. “This project is close to my heart and our whole team is so proud that we could get this facility operational in time when it is most needed.”
The new hub has begun operations in anticipation for the annual increase in volume that will start around Cyber Week and continue through January 2021. Part of a $500 million Canada investment plan announced in 2018, the facility features advanced scanning and sortation technology, integrated with data-driven tools to increase efficiency and reliability for UPS’s customers in one of the fastest growing provinces in Canada.