Amazon is Ending Their AmazonSmile Program in February

charAfter 10 years, Amazon is ending their AmazonSmile donation program to focus its philanthropic giving to programs with greater impact.

AmazonSmile Program is Ending

Amazon is making some big changes! Amazon recently announced that they will be ending their AmazonSmile program on February 20th, 2023. After almost 10 years, the company said in a recent email to its customers, that the program has not grown to create the impact that they had originally hoped. So sad! 🙁

Not familiar with AmazonSmile? It is a program that allows Amazon shoppers to create special links (at no cost to them), that in turn supports their favorite charitable organizations. With every eligible purchase, AmazonSmile donates 0.5% to that charitable organization – including churches, schools, and organizations like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, ASPCA, and others.

Now, Amazon wants to focus on other areas that will make a meaningful change—from building affordable housing to providing access to computer science education for students in underserved communities to using their logistics infrastructure and technology to assist broad communities impacted by natural disasters.

Take a peek at some of the ways they’re making a difference…

Housing Equity Fund: We’re investing $2 billion to build and preserve affordable housing in our hometown communities. In just two years, we’ve provided funding 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 host more than 18,000 moderate- to low-income families, many of them with children. In one year alone, our investments have been able to increase the affordable housing stock in communities like Bellevue, Washington and Arlington, Virginia by at least 20%.

Amazon Future Engineer: We’ve funded computer science curriculum for more than 600,000 students across over 5,000 schools—all in underserved communities. We have plans to reach an additional 1 million students this year. We’ve also provided immediate assistance to 55,000 students in our hometown communities by giving them warm clothes for the winter, food, and school supplies.

Community Delivery Program: We’ve partnered with food banks in 35 U.S. cities to deliver more than 23 million meals, using our logistics infrastructure to help families in need access healthy food—and we plan to deliver 12 million more meals this year alone. In addition to our delivery services, we’ve also donated 30 million meals in communities across the country.

Amazon Disaster Relief: We’re using our logistics capabilities, inventory, and cloud technology to provide fast aid to communities affected by natural disasters. For example, we’ve created a Disaster Relief Hub in Atlanta with more than 1 million relief items ready for deployment, our Disaster Relief team has responded to more than 95 natural disasters, and we’ve donated more than 20 million relief products to nonprofits assisting communities on the ground.

Community giving: We support hundreds of local nonprofits doing meaningful work in cities where our employees and their families live. For example, each year we donate hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations working to build stronger communities, from youth sport leagues, to local community colleges, to shelters for families experiencing homelessness.

So now what??

To help charities that have been a part of the AmazonSmile program with this transition, Amazon has said they will provide them with a one-time donation equivalent to three months of what they earned in 2022 through the program. Charities will also be able to accrue additional donations until the program officially closes in February.

Once AmazonSmile officially closes, charities will still be able to seek support from Amazon customers by creating their own wish lists. (Find out how to create an Amazon Wish List over here).

Some folks have not been happy about this change and have already launched petitions on Change.org to keep it around – like this one with almost 700 signatures and this one with over 500 signatures.

What do you think of this change??

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