When most people picture corporate volunteering, they think of packing meal kits or sorting donations. That work matters. It gives nonprofits essential support. Skills-based volunteering complements traditional volunteering by going deeper on specific challenges that keep nonprofit leaders up at night.
Recently, we teamed up with Amazon to bring skills-based volunteering to the frontline. While most skills-based volunteering programs are typically designed for corporate employees, Amazon has designed its skills-based volunteering program to reach beyond corporate roles and onto the operations floor, where employees bring logistics, supply chain, and problem-solving expertise that many nonprofits need.
Skills-based volunteering starts with listening. Before a single employee enters the room, we work backwards from the nonprofit, understanding their operations, their pain points, and the specific expertise that would make the biggest difference. Nonprofits often know where their back-office operations lag, but struggle to package those challenges into clear asks for skilled volunteers. Employees can hesitate too, unsure how their time will translate into real impact. Catchafire bridges that gap by partnering with nonprofits upfront to translate broad needs into focused, actionable project scopes giving both sides the clarity and confidence to hit the ground running.
When we applied that lens to hunger relief organizations, a powerful pattern emerged. Food banks and frontline food rescue operations are, at their core, logistics businesses, rescuing perishable goods, managing unpredictable inventory, balancing cold-storage capacity, and routing deliveries on razor-thin schedules. Many of those challenges overlap with what Amazon’s operations teams work on every day at scale. By starting with the nonprofit's needs first, we were intentional in matching the right skill sets by pairing warehouse and supply chain experts with community organizations running parallel operations with a shared mission to serve their neighbors.
“Amazon is known for using its logistics expertise to deliver for customers around the world. Our operations employees have unique experience and skills that directly mirrors the challenges community organizations face every day. Through our partnership with Catchafire, Amazon’s skilled volunteers from across our entire organization are co-creating solutions alongside our partners to deliver lasting, sustainable impact."
— Alicia Friedrich, Amazon Community Impact
This past September, more than 60 Amazon leaders from an Indianapolis fulfillment center joined us for an afternoon dedicated to lending their supply chain, operations, and logistics expertise to local hunger relief organizations.
Our pre-event discovery work surfaced Second Helpings as an ideal partner. For over 25 years, Central Indiana's Second Helpings has rescued perishable food to create over 5,500 daily meals for local agencies. Because their supply is rescued rather than purchased, staff rarely know what ingredients will arrive until the day before, making every operational decision a real-time puzzle.
Second Helpings came to the workshop looking to clear up a general backup in meal production.
Working together, the Second Helpings and Amazon teams mapped the production workflow end-to-end, combining on-the-ground context with a fresh operational lens. What emerged was a hidden constraint that reframed the challenge entirely: it wasn't kitchen prep space holding things up, but cooling capacity.
While the kitchen had the space to prep 3,600 meals a day, the blast cooler capped total production at 2,400. By reframing the bottleneck, from kitchen output to refrigeration throughput, the volunteers helped outline a new cooling strategy that could position Second Helpings to feed thousands more neighbors each week
The Indianapolis workshop is one example of what becomes possible when skills-based volunteering extends beyond corporate headquarters. Most programs in the field haven't made that leap yet. Amazon's approach is helping move the industry forward by designing skills-based volunteering to be accessible to employees across the entire organization—from corporate offices to fulfillment centers—and this is just the beginning.
For the Amazon team, the engagement brought their expertise into a new context. The same problem-solving skills that power Amazon's operations were exactly what Second Helpings needed to unlock the next phase of their growth.
That's the kind of lasting impact skills-based volunteering unlocks when you start with the community's needs and match them with the right expertise.