Nearly 27 million people go to work for the Fortune 500 companies every day. We found 15 of them—sometimes working together—whose extraordinary acts of bravery, kindness and selflessness are changing people’s lives

Michele Haddad, 47

Executive Assistant, Ingram Micro

Michele Haddad, right, embraces a Syrian refugee whom she has visited every year since starting her trips to the Middle East.

Courtesy of Michele Haddad

Location: Santa Ana, Calif.

Michele Haddad is a single mother with a full-time job at Ingram Micro (No. 62), the electronics company, but she still manages to find time to respond to crises around the world when they strike. Since her first trip to Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, she’s travelled to disaster-stricken sites in Haiti, Peru, Greece, Mexico, Costa Rica, and across the United States.

Since 2011, she has also made annual trips to conflict zones, volunteering to help refugees of the Syrian Civil War living in unofficial camps in Lebanon and northern Iraq. “During a quiet time of natural disasters, that’s when I looked into the refugee crisis,” she explains. She also raises money for them in the U.S. and buys supplies like tea, toiletries and food, to deliver to the camps. “I know I can’t solve these people’s problems,” she says. “But I get a lot of satisfaction out of just helping people through that day and giving people hope that people do care.”

Haddad’s good works aren’t limited to far-flung populations. When not in a disaster zone—where she is 5-6 weeks a year—she helps asylum-seekers in Orange County, as a volunteer with Voice of the Refugees, a California non-profit that provides immigrants with services like resume coaching, rides to doctor appointments and government meetings, ESL classes, and food. As for her son, Haddad brings him along on as many of her deployments as she can. “I’d never see him otherwise,” she jokes.

Mustapha Gore, 60

Executive Services Agent, Citigroup

Courtesy of Mustapha Gore

Location: London, United Kingdom

During his childhood, Mustapha Gore slept alone in a Ugandan dormitory, orphaned by violence in his home country of South Sudan. “The community took it upon itself to educate me and take me to their homes for Christmas and Eid [the festival marking the end of Ramadan],” he says. After crossing the Mediterranean in 1999 and building himself a new life in London, Gore hasn’t forgotten the hardship of his childhood—or the generosity he encountered in Uganda. With his salary at Citigroup (No. 28), where he works as an executive services agent, Gore began sending money back to the Ugandan town of Bombo, telling his friends to buy bricks without saying why. In 2010, with some financial help from his colleagues at Citi, he opened Greenacres Junior Academy to about 115 students, including girls, indigent children and orphans in Bombo. Gore visits the school twice each year, for Eid and for Christmas. “These children have nowhere to go but they see me and we rejoice together,” he says. “When I get there, the rules go out the windows. They run out of the classroom and come greet me, yelling, ‘Director’s here! Director’s here!’” Each year, the school has grown larger—now, it houses and educates more than 315 students.

Jeremy Folland, 41

Financial Associate, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans

Courtesy of Thrivent Media Production

Location: Hallock, Minn.

On the morning of Oct. 2, 2012, Karlstad, Minnesota, was hot, dry and windy—peak conditions for wildfires. Jeremy Folland, Karlstad’s volunteer fire chief, was at his desk at Thrivent (No. 333), a financial planning company where he has worked for almost twelve years, but as the winds picked up, he decided to head home early. When Folland pulled up to his property, just a few miles outside the town, he saw a fireball the size of a small house rolling across his driveway. Folland called his dispatcher and activated the wildfire plan that he had prepared in advance, his eyes tracking the fireball as it approached his home. The fire departments called were able to control most of the fire surrounding his house, but it was moving toward the rest of Karlstad. “I had a bigger picture of responsibility to deal with,” Folland says. He instructed the fire engines to abandon his yard and save the town instead.

Thanks for an evacuation order that Folland issued, people were able to escape their homes and the school, hospital and nursing home as the town became cloaked in thick smoke. With reinforcements from surrounding towns, the tireless work of Folland and his crew, and a change in weather, the fire— which Karlstad mayor Nick Amb says was the most severe he had ever experienced— was controlled. “Jeremy was running the show,” Amb says. “I know he’s someone I can count on.”

Kevin Wang, 35

TEALS Founder and Ringleader, Microsoft

Courtesy of Kevin Wang

Location: Redmond, Wash.

Only one in ten K-12 schools in the U.S. teaches computer science, according to Microsoft —a stunning contrast compared to the 1.5 million computer science-related jobs that will need to be filled in the country in 2018. Kevin Wang, who taught high school in the Bay Area for three years after graduating from U-C Berkeley, is on a mission to change that. Wang took a job at Microsoft (No. 31) in 2006, but he missed teaching. His circadian rhythms did too. “I was still waking up at six in the morning because I was so used to it,” Wang says. “Software people go to work around ten, so I had a lot of free time to kill.” He started teaching first period computer science at a nearby high school in 2009, and soon, other high schools were asking for him, too.

The next school year, Wang wrangled ten friends into teaching first period computer science at four Seattle high schools. By the 2011-2012 school year, he was training and organizing 40 volunteers in 13 schools. “I was doing this in the mornings, at lunch, after work,” Wang said. “I had a decision to make.” He penned a resignation letter and sold his Porsche, preparing to make the program, called TEALS, his day job. Then, Microsoft made an offer that was impossible to turn down: Bring TEALS under the Microsoft umbrella and let the company foot the bill for the program. Wang accepted.

This school year, the program encompasses 131 schools and almost 500 volunteers, less than a quarter of whom are Microsoft employees. Many of the schools with TEALS programs are Title I schools, meaning that at least 40 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunch. “Everyone doesn’t need to be a computer scientist, but it’s important for students graduating from high school to think that it’s not magic,” Wang says.

Mike DelPizzo, 60

Professional, Technical, Process and Quality Manager, AT&T

Photograph by Win DelPizzo

Location: Jacksonville, Fla.

Mike DelPizzo, a quality assurance professional at AT&T (No. 12) in Jacksonville, Fla., was reading the newspaper one Sunday morning in November 2013 when he saw that the cremated remains of a veteran were going to be buried in a cardboard box at the Jacksonville National Cemetery. “Being a veteran, that really disturbed me,” says DelPizzo, who served more than 20 years in the Air Force. An avid woodworker, he reached out to the cemetery and offered to make cremation urns for any deceased veterans who needed them. He made four urns, and within two weeks, the cemetery called for more. DelPizzo began making the urns regularly, and delivering the simple wooden boxes whenever there was a need. In March 2014, one of his urns was used in a ceremony organized by the Missing in America Project, an organization that honors and buries the unclaimed remains of veterans. They asked for more urns, too— 40 of them—and he now stores the boxes at his office at AT&T so he can deliver them at a moment’s notice. He’s also begun serving as a pallbearer at the Missing in America Project’s ceremonies. “When they asked me to be the pallbearer, I can’t tell you the feeling I had when I first held the cremated remains in an urn that I made,” he says. As a veteran himself, it’s his way of paying it forward. To date, DelPizzo has made over 200 urns for cremated veterans.

Paula Kok, 46

Network Support Senior Specialist, AT&T

Paula Kok, right, with her kidney recipient Lornette Stewart.

Photograph by Michael Kok

Location: Helena, Ala.

About four years ago, Paula Kok, a network support specialist at AT&T (No. 12) and a former electronics technician in the Navy, desperately wanted to donate her bone marrow. Her husband had leukemia, but she wasn’t a match, and neither were any of their friends or family. Though her husband was able to join a medical trial that put his cancer into remission, Kok couldn’t shake the thought of being at the mercy of a stranger matching her husband, she says. “The Holy Spirit said to me: You’re someone’s stranger.”

She contacted the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital (UAB) and said she wanted to donate her kidney to a stranger. After a battery of tests, Kok went under the knife in December 2013. Though she didn’t want to know who her kidney recipient was, Kok eventually met her at a UAB event. It turned out that the woman, Lornette Stewart, had also served in the military, and the two women trained in the same Navy boot camp, in sister companies, in 1986. In truth, Kok didn’t just donate one kidney, but—in manner of speaking—45. That’s because Kok set into motion a kidney donation chain that UAB claims is the country’s longest on record. Each transplant patient has had an individual donate a kidney to a stranger on his or her behalf. For example, Stewart’s daughter, Jovi Williams, donated a kidney as Stewart prepared to receive Kok’s. A 46th stranger-to-stranger kidney transplant at UAB is scheduled for later this month.

Harry Behrens, 38

Network Engineer, Comcast

Photograph by Sabina Louise Pierce

Location: Vineland, N.J.

Harry Behrens, a network engineer at Comcast (No. 43), was sitting in his living room in rural New Jersey in 2009 when he saw an old woman walking down the street struggling to carry her grocery bags. When Behrens went outside to offer her a ride, she accepted gratefully, and he began giving her regular lifts to the grocery store and back. Behrens soon learned that his neighbor was on food stamps and struggled to afford fresh produce. “I said, ‘Let’s start a little garden out back,’ to give her some produce and us some produce. That’s all I had intentions of.” He mentioned his project to a friend at church who began giving him plants—1,000 pepper plants, 800 heads of lettuce, cantaloupe, watermelon—that would have otherwise been thrown away. When the produce came to harvest, Behrens had such an abundance that he and his friends loaded up their pick-up trucks and drove into poor areas of the surrounding towns, handing out the fresh fruits and vegetables from the backs of their vehicles.

That experience led him to found Impact Harvest in May 2011, an operation that now spans two farms, a food bank, and a distribution center that packages over 120 bags of produce each week during harvest season. Volunteers, many of whom are the organization’s beneficiaries, help with planting, harvesting and delivering the food. Last year, Impact Harvest gave away $25,000 worth of produce. “It’s God’s heart for people,” Behrens says. “Our mission statement is to love your neighbor as yourself.”

Marcela Loaiza, 37

Cocktail Waitress, MGM Resorts International

Courtesy of MGM Resorts International

Location: Las Vegas, Nev.

Marcela Loaiza, a cocktail waitress with MGM Resorts (No. 289), has made it her mission to make sure that no sexual trafficking survivor goes unsupported. Loaiza was a single mother in her mid-twenties and working two jobs in her native Colombia when her daughter fell ill and needed to be hospitalized, costing Loaiza both her jobs. Burdened by mounting medical bills, Loaiza took up a man’s offer to be a professional dancer in Tokyo—but when she arrived there in 1999, she says she was forced into sexual slavery. Though Loaiza was eventually able to flee and make her way back to Colombia, her escape didn’t lead to a happy ending: she received no support or justice from the Colombian government, she says. After two years, Marcela became suicidal. One day, while crying and praying in a church, she was approached by a nun. She told the nun her story, and the nun, in exchange, gave Loaiza a crucial gift: she told her that her experiences weren’t her fault. “For the first time, I realized I was a victim,” Loaiza says. The nun helped her get back on her feet, providing her psychological support for three years.

Loaiza has since founded the Marcela Loaiza Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to helping other sex-trafficking victims receive the support they need. With help from the nun who found her so many years ago, Loaiza provides psychological support and other help to 12 women in Colombia. She formed an alliance with the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, delivering speeches at embassies, universities, and government agencies—and helping others understand that sexual slavery is not a choice.

Patrick Working, Mark Nowlin, Crystal Wright, Noelle Banks, Nina Porter, and Princeton Richardson

Captain, First Officer, and Flight Attendants, Delta Air Lines

From left to right, in the first row: Princeton Richardson, Patrick Working, Nina Porter, Mark Nowlin, Ernie Applegate, Retha Applegate, Crystal Wright, Amber Applegate, Philip Applegate, Noelle Banks. Front row: Brayden and Kaylinn Applegate.

Courtesy of Delta

Location (in order): Detroit, Mich.; Detroit, Mich.; Atlanta, Ga.; New York, N.Y.; Atlanta, Ga.; Atlanta, Ga.

It had been a long day, and the Delta (No. 73) crew—a captain, first officer, and three flight attendants—piled into a van for a ride to their hotel for the night’s layover in Denver. They joked with their driver, Ernie Applegate, for a few minutes before beginning to check their phones or doze off. Suddenly, the car swerved to the right on the expressway. No one wanted to say anything, but then it happened again. Then, Applegate slumped over the steering wheel with a groan, the car hurtling in the direction he slumped. Flight attendant Noelle Banks grabbed the wheel and Princeton Richardson, also a flight attendant, flew to the floor to push the brakes with his hands—just moments before the vehicle careened to the edge the elevated road. The crew carried Applegate out of the car and began administering CPR on the side of the road. As Applegate fell in and out of consciousness, they took turns giving him compressions until an ambulance arrived.

That night, the crew went to the hospital to visit Applegate and meet his family. He had suffered a massive heart attack. They also learned that Applegate’s daughter was about to give birth to his grandson. Thanks to their quick thinking, Applegate was alive to meet him.

Paul ‘Mo’ Moline and Jim Round, 51 and 46

General Manager and Global Forwarding Regional Director, respectively, C.H. Robinson Worldwide

Jim Round, left, and Mo Moline, right, accept an award from the Transportation Intermediates Association in April.

Courtesy of C.H. Robinson

Location: Forth Worth and Grapevine, Texas

Paul “Mo” Moline and Jim Round have been touched by cancer more than a few times. In the mid-90s, Moline’s mother was diagnosed with bone cancer, and a few years later, Round’s father was told he had the disease in his lungs. In 2001, Moline and Round, friends who have both worked at trucking and logistics company C.H. Robinson (No. 225) for more than twenty years, decided to channel their pain into something more productive: a small golf event to raise money for cancer research. As the years passed, the annual golf tournament evolved into a much larger weekend of activities christened the “MJ Event:” they’ve held kickball and softball tourneys, a Texas Hold’Em competition, silent auctions and rides around the Texas Motor Speedway with professional NASCAR drivers. The event attracts hundreds of participants every year, including many of C.H. Robinson’s top executives. Then, in 2013, Round was diagnosed with skin cancer. While he was under the knife, Moline found out that he had prostate cancer. (“When I was diagnosed with cancer, I was getting all kinds of attention Mo didn’t like, so Mo got cancer too,” Round jokes.) Though they’re both doing well now, their own bouts with the disease made the MJ Event all the more personal. Since starting the fundraiser in 2001, Moline and Round have collected more than $5 million for cancer research and support.

Michael Lee Absher, 25

Teller, Wells Fargo

Courtesy of Wells Fargo

Location: Hendersonville, N.C.

Homeless youth are rarely noticeable to people who aren’t looking for them; they often sleep on friends’ couches, in school buses or in their cars. But for Michael Absher, a teller for Wells Fargo (No. 30) in Hendersonville, N.C., who was homeless for a portion of high school, homeless youth are far from invisible. It wasn’t long after Absher graduated from high school and secured housing of his own in 2009 that he learned the homeless shelter that supported him would be closing its housing services. He started Only Hope WNC, an organization dedicated to addressing the need of homeless youth in his hometown of Hendersonville. Through the organization, Absher arranges informal host homes for homeless youth so they have a place to live until they graduate. In emergency situations, such as extreme weather, he’ll pay for a hotel room for them. Only Hope WNC also stocks a basic needs closet for local youth containing items like food (“food that kids would eat—not just green beans”), hygiene products and school supplies. Much of the funding for the group comes from the annual “Sleep Outs” that Absher hosts each year on the steps of the local courthouse. Through his efforts, Absher met state Sen. Tom Apodaca, who has worked with Absher to introduce a bill in the North Carolina Senate that would authorize a legislative study on the needs of unaccompanied homeless youth.

For the homeless kids Absher encounters, his own history with homelessness makes a difference. “They get a little more comfortable because they know that it’s not an old person trying to tell them what to do,” he says. “It breaks that barrier of respect because I can help that kid understand it’s not their fault.”

Anne Cheung, 39

Senior Associate Scientist, Biogen

Anne Cheung, center bottom, sits with several scholarship recipients in Meiganga, Cameroon, wearing an outfit they made for her.

Courtesy of Anne Cheung

Location: Cambridge, Mass.

Anne Cheung is committed to giving women in Cameroon a fair shot at an education. When her friend Anne Rapin returned from serving in the Peace Corps there, she told Cheung that she was haunted by how women and girls were treated in the small sub-Saharan African country. Cheung, a scientist at the biopharmaceutical companyBiogen (No. 298), decided to use a small referral bonus she had received to seed a scholarship program for girls in Cameroon. A few years later, in 2008, Cheung and Rapin founded A2Empowerment, a non-profit informally partnered with Peace Corps volunteers in Cameroon. That first year, they awarded scholarships to cover 12 months of secondary education for 17 women who had either dropped out of school or who were likely to do so, according to the assessment of Peace Corps volunteers. Women in Cameroon are often forced to leave school if they become pregnant, says Rapin, and some of the recipients had not been to school in years. A2Empowerment has now funded more than 500 scholarships, including one for a woman to attend university. Says Cheung, “It’s so rewarding to think about what it provides the girls and the hope it gives them. It’s something I’m not ever going to stop doing.”

Richard ‘Stick’ Williams, 62

President, Duke Energy Foundation, Duke Energy

Photograph by Tom Wolfe

Location: Charlotte, N.C.

In 2012, barely half the seniors at West Charlotte High School in Charlotte, N.C., graduated. For Stick Williams, a VP at Duke Energy (No. 116) who grew up in public housing in Greensboro, that was unacceptable. He spearheaded the creation of Project LIFT, a $55 million private-public partnership aimed at improving the performance of public schools in the district. One goal: Increasing the graduation rate at the troubled high school to 90 percent.

Project LIFT is similar to New York’s pioneering Harlem Children’s Zone in that it provides wraparound services like dental clinics and free Internet to the largely disadvantaged local population. But unlike other school turnaround programs, it doesn’t revolve around charter schools. “We knew we could reach far more students if we did this in public schools,” Williams says. “We wanted to see public schools work.”

Project LIFT has recruited teachers from across the country to reinvigorate the West Charlotte schools. It also founded LIFT Academy, a school designed for students that have dropped out school or fallen far behind. At LIFT Academy, students can make up missed credits at their own pace, getting them back on track to graduate. So far, the program seems to be working: in 2014, the graduation rate at West Charlotte High School was 78%. For Williams, the success of LIFT Academy is personal. “When I go to these schools, I look at these students, and I’m looking at Stick Williams,” he tellsFortune. “I was very fortunate that a lot of folks had their fingerprints on me. If we don’t have people putting their fingerprints on these students, they might not have the opportunities I had.”

Russell Doussan, 49

President, New Orleans, Live Nation Entertainment

Russell Doussan, right, with his wife Ashley Tappin-Doussan.

Courtesy of Russell Doussan

Location: New Orleans, La.

When Hartley Doussan was born in Sept. 2010, her parents, Russell and Ashley Tappin-Doussan were devastated to learn that she had two holes in her heart. Thanks to open-heart surgery, the Doussans were able to take a healthy Hartley home. “We couldn’t imagine watching your child die because you couldn’t have a team in place to get her taken care of,” says Russell Doussan, a regional president for Live Nation (No. 392), the events company. He and his wife wanted others to have such happy outcomes, and they decided to help their daughter’s surgeon, who had previously made medical missions to South America and Russia, get the financing to continue his charitable work. In 2011, the couple founded Hartley’s Hearts Foundation, and that October, Doussan flew with a team of doctors to Asuncion, Paraguay, with a goal to fix as many children’s heart defects as they could.

Over the course of the trip, the group performed nine open-heart surgeries and 25 other less invasive procedures. “These parents looked at their child every day as dying. Now they can look at their child as living,” says Doussan. This year, Hartley’s Hearts Foundation will send the team to Asuncion twice: first to pre-screen the most serious patients and to do less invasive procedures, then to perform the open-heart surgeries. In the four years since its inception, the organization has also donated more than $400,000 of medical equipment so that Paraguayan doctors are better resourced to perform such surgeries themselves. But the work is far from over. “Our ultimate dream is for Hartley to run the foundation one day,” says Russell. “She’ll be five in September.”

Kate Cummings, 44

Nurse, DaVita HealthCare Partners

Photograph by James Cummings

Location: Mount Laurel, N.J.

Kate Cummings’ son Jake was born with a congenital heart defect, and though he loved playing at the local playground, he was never able to keep up with the other kids. “He never really realized that he wasn’t like everyone else,” says Cummings, who nonetheless saw how inappropriate the playground was for his disabilities. When Jake passed away in 2007, Cummings’ friend gave her a check. “Think of something to do with it,” she told her, and Cummings decided to found Build Jake’s Place, a non-profit dedicated to making a “Boundless Playground” in southern New Jersey. Cummings, a nurse at DaVita (No. 231), a company specializing in dialysis services, gathered a group of physical and occupational therapists and playground designers to brainstorm ways to make a playground accessible to all children. Boundless Playgrounds aren’t designed exclusively for disabled children, but they are governed by one principle: that every child, no matter his or her ability, should be able to reach the highest point of the playground.

It took three and a half years—and an assortment of fundraising efforts that spanned from coin drives to corporate grants—for Kate to raise the $500,000 needed to build the “boundless” site (or five times the amount necessary to build a traditional playground), but in 2011 she opened Jake’s Place for the first time. At the new site, there are still monkey bars and a climbing wall, but there also spinners off to the side where, for example, autistic children have a place to withdraw—as well as ramps and a bouncy concrete base (rather than wood chips) to allow wheelchairs to glide across the ground. The playground is also designed with plenty of shade because kids with disabilities typically need to rest more often. Now, Cummings says, the playground is always full of kids. “It was overwhelming how many people needed it.”16

Toni Bazon-Forsberg, 54

Senior Environmental Coordinator, Com-Ed, Exelon

Toni Bazon-Forsberg and Shami.

Courtesy of Toni Bazon-Forsberg

Location: Chicago, Ill.

Shami, a six-and-a-half year-old golden retriever, is a remarkably well travelled dog. Though she lives with Toni Bazon-Forsberg in Chicago, Shami regularly travels around the state and to disaster areas like Boston in the wake of the April 2013 marathon bombing. Shami was the first member pup in the Lutheran Church Charities Comfort Dog Ministry, a subsidiary of a national Christian non-profit, which has since grown to include over 80 dogs. Bazon-Forsberg, a senior environmental coordinator for Com-Ed, a subsidiary of energy company Exelon (No. 111) is her main handler and caregiver, and Bazon-Forsberg accompanies Shami on most of her jobs. The pair was especially involved in the healing process of residents in Sandy Hook, CT, after the December 2012 elementary school shooting. As soon as Bazon-Forsberg learned of the event, she and her retriever jumped in the car and drove through the night to Connecticut. They attended memorial services and worked at the Sandy Hook community center, where many local residents convened in the aftermath of the shooting. On one day, a young girl approached Shami and started whispering in her ear. The girl’s mother burst into tears. Those were the first words her daughter had uttered since she had witnessed the murder of her classmates and teacher.

For Bazon-Forsberg, being Shami’s handler has been a life-changing experience. She devotes many of her weekends and evenings, as well as vacation time, to the comfort dog ministry. When Sandy Hook Elementary School reopened in January, Bazon-Forsberg returned to spend 16 days volunteering at the school with Shami. “Sometimes you’ll sit down with someone and all of a sudden, they’ll start to open up,” she says. “The most rewarding thing is seeing what these dogs are capable of.”

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Wednesday, July 29, 2015

HEROES OF THE 500