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UPS and Message of Hope Foundation team up to lift spirits – more help is needed

What’s the story: Happy Hope Bags – and a team of UPSers – bring joy to nearly 100,000 hospitalized children a year.

How it started: As a child, Message of Hope’s founder Emi Burke saw how illnesses were affecting kids while making hospital rounds with her pediatrician father.

More than 26 years later, she decided to start the foundation in the basement of her Massachusetts home, prompted by her son and the desire to provide sick kids with a much-needed lift.
“Finding out our youngest son was profoundly disabled, visually impaired and unable to speak, led me back to my purpose,” Emi said.

She developed Happy Hope Bags, which contain items such as crayons, coloring books and stuffed animals.

How UPS is involved: The customer uses UPS to ship the final product from the Message of Hope facility to hospitals. In addition, Ian Dalpe, UPS area sales manager, noticed the organization needed extra help to fulfill its mission, and is part of a team of UPSers who volunteer to pack the bags.

Given the surge in consumer demand over the past year, and the resulting pressure on carriers to deliver product in a timely manner, one might be excused for thinking that the old notion of a “peak season” is defunct.

What does “peak” mean when congested ports, a severe shortage of trucks and overflowing warehouses become the status quo? For a big third-party logistics provider like Coyote Logistics, there’s no let-up.

Coyote is doubly challenged to live up to customer expectations because of its commercial relationship with United Parcel Service, one of the dominant players on the front line of the e-commerce boom. It provides UPS with real-time communications and shipment visibility, by interacting directly with UPS drivers and employees as well as physically staffing most of the parcel giant’s nationwide hubs. “That’s a lot of e-mail communication, and a ton of organization,” says Emily Lockhart, Coyote’s strategic planning manager. Business has exploded over the past year and a half, she adds, due to a massive increase in the number of people shopping from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Waymo and UPS are expanding their nearly two-year-old partnership to include deliveries made using the Alphabet company’s fleet of autonomous Class 8 trucks. The companies had previously only conducted local deliveries using Waymo’s self-driving minivans; now, they will work together on longer-distance freight hauling.

The deliveries will take place in Texas, where Waymo is building a nine-acre hub for its autonomous semi-trailer trucks. Starting now and lasting until the end of the year, Waymo and UPS will collaborate on freight hauling between facilities in Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston. The companies will gather data during the trial process, with an eye on safety and efficiency in particular.

Cold Chain Packaging CoE in Louisville, KY is the company’s first U.S.-based logistics facility to offer reusable cold chain packaging options for customers.

UPS Healthcare announced a new set of facilities and continued global expansion designed to bring broader capabilities to global healthcare logistics customers.

Its newest cold chain and packaging center in Louisville, KY, is located on the UPS Healthcare campus near the Worldport global air hub. Combined with ongoing expansion throughout Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, UPS Healthcare continues to build comprehensive and sophisticated healthcare logistics capabilities.

The new Louisville cold chain facility is part of an ongoing strategy to expand UPS Healthcare’s global footprint. The expansions bring increased flexibility and efficiency to customers, as well as cold chain capabilities. This newest facility, named the ‘Cold Chain Packaging Center of Excellence,’ is the company’s first U.S.-based logistics facility to offer reusable cold chain packaging options for customers, utilizing the entire life cycle of temperature-controlled packages and contributing to a circular economy.