Author: sHq_LoGiNz

Memphis, Tennessee, is our global headquarters city and home to over 30,000 team members. Memphis is rich with culture, talent, and history, and its energetic and resilient spirit brings us great pride. At the same time, Memphis faces real and persistent challenges. Nearly one in four residents lives in poverty, and thousands of young adults are neither in school nor working. These realities affect families, neighborhoods, and the future workforce that will power the city for decades to come.

In 2025, our FedEx Cares team worked closely with city experts, nonprofit leaders, our team members, and other Memphians to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges facing the current and future Memphis workforce. After many months of listening and learning, we launched a new support strategy — Mobilizing Memphis’ Workforce Potential — to fight poverty, create opportunity, foster belonging, and build a stronger Memphis.

Ready, set, launch!

Meet some of the Memphians who earned the education, skills, and credentials to launch new careers with FedEx-supported nonprofits:

Madison Smith, Army Veteran, gained welding and machining skills at Moore Tech, and set her sights on a career at Toyota Motor Manufacturing.

Cyrille Connor built essential workplace habits and industrial electricity and plant maintenance skills at Moore Tech, then landed a job as a Maintenance Technician at Lallemand.

Zakaria Culp graduated her EMT program thanks to the Memphis Medical District Collaborative’s Hire Local program and is fulfilling a lifelong dream of working as a paramedic firefighter.

Alan Manteiga graduated the Memphis Excel Center and plans to continue his college career at Tennessee College of Applied Technology.

When basic needs are met, Memphians can focus on careers & family

Together, FedEx and Feed the Children are tackling one of Memphis’ toughest challenges: making sure children and families have the food, supplies, and support they need to focus on education and careers.

Nationwide, one in five children face food insecurity, and some Memphis families often must choose between paying rent and buying groceries, school supplies and hygiene items. To meet that challenge, FedEx and Feed the Children built a year-round approach that combines four programs:

• Feed the Children’s Food & Essentials hubs inside Memphis Shelby County schools give students and families steady access to nutritious food, personal care items, and learning materials.
• Feed the Children’s Summer Feed & Read program keeps kids fed and engaged with books during the summer months, when school meals and classroom learning is paused.
• Feed the Children’s Backpack-N-Go program sends children back to school each year with the supplies they need to start strong.
• Feed the Children’s Resource Rallies bring food, hygiene products, and essentials directly to families facing tough months. In 2025, these programs reached more than 7,300 Memphians, delivering over 108,000 meals and more than $550,000 worth of food, hygiene products, books, and backpacks.

Award winning programs

Slingshot Memphis awarded FedEx the Inspire Award for our work combating poverty and creating lasting change in our headquarters city.

Click here to learn more about FedEx, Slingshot Memphis & the Inspire Award

Our reach in Memphis

From skills-based volunteering to hands-on service, from large organizations to grassroots, FedEx and our team members were busy doing good in Memphis last year.

“Our team members take great pride in programs and volunteer opportunities that support our neighbors. We are committed to building strong local communities and delivering positive change around the world—starting with the places where we live and work.” Jenny Robertson SVP Marketing & Communications, FedEx

Learn more about giving and volunteering at FedEx in the 2025 FedEx Cares Report

Sustainability action offers benefits that businesses have recognized for a long time, like lower energy costs, avoided regulatory fees, brand building, and higher employee satisfaction. But for many companies, it hasn’t always been necessary to make a business case to advance sustainability; acting responsibly was its own bottom line. A new report from the World Economic Forum indicates that now the business case for sustainability is becoming a must-have rather than a “nice-to-have.”

The authors of the WEF’s inaugural Chief Sustainability Officers’ Outlook surveyed 103 chief sustainability officers across five continents with two striking results. First, 63% expect global sustainability progress to hold steady or accelerate over the next year. (Sustainability Online reports on a study from GlobeScan and UN Global Compact that seems to add weight to this finding: just 10% of sustainability practitioners in North America expect companies’ sustainability ambitions to decrease.)

Second, 64% claim that the biggest accelerator of corporate sustainability measures over the next three years will be a stronger business case. This comes in as the lead driver ahead of availability of cheaper technology, expanded value chain collaboration, regulatory action, and international agreements.

Proving that sustainability pays is not a straightforward task. For example, asked what most constrains their company from investing in adaptation to climate change, CSOs pointed to uncertain cost-benefit assessments, as a greater constraint than financing costs, regulatory hurdles, or competing priorities. Indeed, as the report explains, adaptation “often creates value through avoided losses rather than additional revenue,” which makes the benefit hard to quantify and slow to appear.

Report authors Sebastian Buckup and Akanksha Khatri underscore the need to link sustainability to business growth, writing that it “is no longer a commitment to be made; it is a capability to be embedded in growth, competitiveness and resilience.”

Other flagship research came from G&A Institute’s own team last week. The 2026 edition of Sustainability Reporting In Focus is our 15th annual study of corporate sustainability reporting, and finds that in 2025 94% of the S&P 500 and 86% of the Russell 1000 published sustainability reports – both slightly below 2024. But even as the levels ebbed slightly from recent years, our analysts noted that companies are making use of more standards and assuring more of their data. These efforts make the documentation of their sustainability work more robust, and form an important piece of the puzzle for building a reliable business case for continuing to invest.

In other news, the first GHG emissions reports mandated under California’s SB 253 are due in about six weeks – November 10 – and ESG Today covers CARB’s confirmation of reliefs for the opening cycle, including prior-year data and submissions without assurance. To delve into SB 253’s sister law on climate risk, SB 261, turn to our joint research with Ceres to examine 154 voluntary filings.

Meanwhile, new polling covered by Trellis indicates that 71% of climate-skeptical Republicans say companies should reduce their climate impacts, because doing so “encourages long-term planning.”

Finally, as we see in ESG Dive, the business and public perspectives on sustainability are not reflected in recent action in Washington, DC, where the EPA finalized the repeal of most Biden-era power plant carbon rules, and proposed to rescind the rest.

This is just the introduction of G&A’s Sustainability Highlights newsletter this week. Click here to view the full issue.