Today we started sending the following email to AmazonSmile customers and we want to share it here as well:
Dear Customer,
In 2013, we launched AmazonSmile to make it easier for our customers to support their favorite charities. However, after nearly a decade, the program hasn’t grown to have the impact we originally hoped for. With so many legitimate organizations – more than 1 million worldwide – our ability to make an impact has often been scattered too thinly.
We are writing to let you know that we plan to retire AmazonSmile by February 20, 2023. We will continue to pursue and invest in other areas where we have seen that we can make meaningful changes – from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science classes for students in underserved communities to leveraging our logistics infrastructure and technology to support broad communities affected by natural disasters.
To help charities that have been part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, we will give them a one-time donation equal to three months of their earnings in 2022 through the program, and they can also raise additional donations until the official one Completion of the program in February. Even after AmazonSmile’s closure, charities can still seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists.
As a company, we will continue to support a wide range of other programs that help thousands of charities and communities across the United States. For example:
- Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and maintain affordable housing in our home communities. In just two years, we have committed funds to create more than 14,000 affordable homes – and we expect to build at least 6,000 more in the coming months. These units will house more than 18,000 middle- to low-income families, many with children. In just one year, our investments have increased the supply of affordable housing by at least 20% in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia.
- Amazon Future Engineer: We have funded computer science curriculums for more than 600,000 students in over 5,000 schools – all in underserved communities. We plan to reach another 1 million students this year. We have also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our home communities by providing them with warm winter clothing, food and school supplies.
- Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 US cities to deliver more than 23 million meals and leverage our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food — and we plan to deliver 12 this year alone Millions more meals to deliver. In addition to our home delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals to communities across the country.
- Amazon Disaster Relief: We use our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to quickly provide relief to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve established a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million supplies ready to go, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits to help local communities.
- Community Giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits that do meaningful work in the cities where our employees and their families live. For example, we donate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sports leagues to local community colleges to shelters for families affected by homelessness.
We will continue to work to make a difference in many ways, and our long-term commitment to our communities remains the same – we are determined to be better every day for our customers, our employees and the world at large.
Thank you for being an Amazon customer.