I recently heard a story that moved me about a sewing operator in Bangladesh. She used to not know where to go to find a doctor, or even how to ask for one. Then the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), a Levi Strauss Foundation (LSF) grantee, came to her factory. IPPF brings safe, confidential and convenient health services directly to garment workers, who are overwhelmingly women, to help them overcome steep barriers to care, like long hours, stigma and lost wages for time away from work.
Now there’s a doctor at the sewing operator’s workplace who she can see if needed. That level of care isn’t a perk: “It makes me feel respected and secure,” she said.
That’s what $400 million looks like in action.
As of this year, LSF has issued a total of $400 million in grants to nonprofits since our founding in 1952. It’s a major milestone for our foundation, but what strikes me most isn’t the number itself. It’s what it took to get here: more than seven decades of decisions to show up early, stay focused and keep fighting on the most urgent, and often most underfunded, issues of the day.
That commitment to social change predates LSF. Levi Strauss believed that business had a responsibility to improve society, especially communities that were overlooked or under-resourced. He donated a portion of his first profits to San Francisco orphanages, closed his business so employees could vote and funded scholarships for women at the University of California, Berkeley.
That conviction — that business can and should be a force for good — was the foundation that LSF was built on when it was established more than 70 years ago and has shown up again and again in the decades since. We have consistently been a first-mover among corporate philanthropies on the most challenging issues of our time, willing to step into spaces others were not.
In 1982, for example, LSF began grantmaking in the fight against HIV/AIDS — an issue that at the time carried enormous stigma and attracted little corporate support. We backed community organizations caring for people living with HIV and funded harm-reduction programs, syringe exchanges and organizers who were themselves living with the disease. That early leadership helped make it safe for other funders to join the fight, and today’s robust field of HIV/AIDS philanthropy builds on groundwork laid four decades ago.
This same spirit carries on in our work today and can be seen in stories like the sewing operator’s. This is the work that drew me to the foundation in the first place and what this milestone really means to me. It’s a marker of the lasting change we’re creating in the communities where we operate. It’s a promise to our grantees that we are and will continue to be a consistent, long-term partner. It shows that we’ve kept our word, been true to our values and, most importantly, earned the right to keep going.
To learn more about the Levi Strauss Foundation and its work, visit the LSF page on Levistrauss.com
