heroes of the 500

Nearly 27 million people go to work for the Fortune 500 companies every day. We found 55 of them—sometimes working together—whose extraordinary acts of bravery, kindness and selflessness are changing people’s lives. Read more about our second annual list <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/06/17/heroes-of-the-fortune-500-2015/">here</a>.

Location: Santa Ana, Calif.

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Michele Haddad is a single mother with a full-time job at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ingram-micro-62" target="_blank">Ingram Micro</a> (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.”

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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.

Michele Haddad

Location: London, United Kingdom

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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 <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/citigroup-28" target="_blank">Citigroup</a> (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 <a href="http://www.greenacreseducationtrust.co.uk/about-us.php">Greenacres Junior Academy</a> 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.

Mustapha Gore

Location: Hallock, Minn.

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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 <a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/thrivent-financial-for-lutherans-333">Thrivent</a> (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.

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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."

Jeremy Folland

Location: Redmond, Wash.

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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 <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/microsoft-31" target="_blank">Microsoft</a> (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.

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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.

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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.

Kevin Wang

Location: Jacksonville, Fla.

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Mike DelPizzo, a quality assurance professional at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/att-12" target="_blank">AT&amp;T</a> (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&amp;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.

Mike DelPizzo

Location: Helena, Ala.

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About four years ago, Paula Kok, a network support specialist at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/att-12" target="_blank">AT&amp;T</a> (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.”

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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.

Paula Kok

Location: Vineland, N.J.

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Harry Behrens, a network engineer at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/comcast-43" target="_blank">Comcast</a> (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.

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That experience led him to found <a href="http://www.impactharvest.org">Impact Harvest</a> 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.”

Harry Behrens

Location: Las Vegas, Nev.

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Marcela Loaiza, a cocktail waitress with <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/mgm-resorts-international-289" target="_blank">MGM Resorts</a> (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.

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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.

Marcela Loaiza

Location (in order): Detroit, Mich.; Detroit, Mich.; Atlanta, Ga.; New York, N.Y.; Atlanta, Ga.; Atlanta, Ga.

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It had been a long day, and the <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/delta-air-lines-73" target="_blank">Delta</a> (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.

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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.

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

Location: Forth Worth and Grapevine, Texas

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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 <a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ch-robinson-worldwide-225" target="_blank">C.H. Robinson</a> (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 “<a href="http://www.mjcancerfree.com/mj_about.html#.VYBMb-v_Rsw">MJ Event</a>:” 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.

Paul 'Mo' Moline and Jim Round

Location: Hendersonville, N.C.

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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 <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/wells-fargo-30" target="_blank">Wells Fargo</a> (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 <a href="http://www.onlyhopewnc.org">Only Hope WNC</a>, 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.

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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.”

Michael Lee Absher

Location: Cambridge, Mass.

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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 company <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/biogen-298" target="_blank">Biogen</a> (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 <a href="http://www.a2empowerment.org">A2Empowerment</a>, 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."

Anne Cheung

Location: Charlotte, N.C.

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In 2012, barely half the seniors at West Charlotte High School in Charlotte, N.C., graduated. For Stick Williams, a VP at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/duke-energy-116" target="_blank">Duke Energy</a> (No. 116) who grew up in public housing in Greensboro, that was unacceptable. He spearheaded the creation of <a href="http://www.projectliftcharlotte.org">Project LIFT</a>, 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.

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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.”

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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 tells Fortune. “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.”

Richard 'Stick' Williams

Location: New Orleans, La.

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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 <a href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/live-nation-entertainment-392" target="_blank">Live Nation</a> (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 <a href="http://www.hartleysheartsfoundation.org">Hartley’s Hearts Foundation</a>, 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.

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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.”

Russell Doussan

Location: Mount Laurel, N.J.

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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 <a href="http://www.buildjakesplace.org/index.html">Build Jake’s Place</a>, a non-profit dedicated to making a “Boundless Playground” in southern New Jersey. Cummings, a nurse at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/davita-healthcare-partners-231" target="_blank">DaVita</a> (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.

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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.”

Kate Cummings

Location: Chicago, Ill.

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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 <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/exelon-111" target="_blank">Exelon</a> (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.

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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.”

Toni Bazon-Forsberg

Location: Hershey, Pa.

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Last year, when one Kickstarter campaign earned more than $55,000 to make potato salad (“I haven’t decided what kind yet,” the organizer wrote), Michael Clark was using crowdfunding to achieve a less pedestrian goal. Since 2013, through his non-profit <a href="http://smallsacrifice.org">Small Sacrifice</a>, Clark, a senior sales representative at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/eli-lilly-151" target="_blank">Eli Lilly</a> (No. 151), has held six virtual events to fundraise for a variety of charitable projects. With each event, he asks participants around the world to give up something, like lunch or make-up, and instead donate the money to a related initiative, like the non-profit Feed My Starving Children or paying for cleft palate surgeries for children.

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Clark was inspired to start Small Sacrifice after traveling to Lima, Peru through an Eli Lilly volunteer program called Connecting Hearts Abroad. There, he volunteered at a school for special needs children in a poor neighborhood. Since the school couldn’t afford to feed the children lunch, they would bring their own—often moldy sandwiches or tiny cups of rice. “I was helping them eat stuff that I wouldn’t eat myself, and that tore my heart out,” Clark says. “I don’t have a lot of crazy skills, so I was thinking, what can I do?” Since founding Small Sacrifice, Clark has raised money for 20,000 meals, 34 cleft palate surgeries and 20 lifetime water filtration systems for families, among other initiatives. But one of the most meaningful parts of his work has been seeing the impact his work has had on his twin daughters. On their third birthday, they told him they didn’t want presents—they wanted to give meals to needy children instead.

Michael Clark

Location: Duarte, Calif.

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In December 2003, Ryan Russek’s father Ron was told he had kidney cancer, a diagnosis that led the Russek family to spend countless hours in the hospital during the next two years. Throughout those visits, they watched pediatric patients suffer through chemotherapy and radiation, just as Ron had endured. As Christmas approached, Russek, a senior buyer at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/carmax-232" target="_blank">Carmax</a> (No. 232), decided to give toys to all the children who were too sick to be released from the hospital for the holiday. “I could see the kids getting super excited with joy,” says Russek. They resolved to deliver the presents every December, but in 2005, just hours before the father and son were scheduled to make their toy rounds in the cancer ward, Ron passed away. Despite his grief, Russek still went to the hospital with his presents that afternoon – this time accompanied by his mother.

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Since then, Russek has continued to deliver toys to the City of Hope Cancer Research Hospital each Christmas, but with the help of his church, CarMax, local businesses and volunteers, his efforts have grown. The toy drive, which Russek has named Wish Upon a Toy, now collects so many extra gifts that he opens a pop-up toy “store” in the hospital a few weeks before Christmas so that adult patients, who are often too sick to leave or too burdened with medical bills to afford gifts, can get free presents for their children. Says Russek, “It’s really cool to be a part of something like that, to help people in a really bad spot have some sort of normalcy.”

Ryan Russek

Location: Victoria, Texas

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Each May, soldiers and veterans from around the country converge on Port O’Connor, Tex., to honor and celebrate military service. The occasion, called Warrior’s Weekend, involves fishing and a flag ceremony, and the hundreds of service members who attend—bused en masse from Houston—are given a hero’s welcome. This year, the event brought together nearly 1,000 current and retired soldiers and required a fleet of 415 boats. “They can’t go anywhere without someone thanking them,” says Ron Kocian, one of the primary organizers of the festivities and the enormous logistical operation it entails. “The thank yous and hugs and kisses when they get off the plane in Houston—that’s the tip of the iceberg for what they get all weekend.” Kocian, who leads a team on an assembly line at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/caterpillar-54" target="_blank">Caterpillar</a> (No. 54) that makes hydraulic excavators, isn’t a veteran, but he has helped organize the event since his father first staged it in 2007. A non-profit, Warrior’s Weekend funds the activities as well as the travel of veterans—all of whom were wounded in battle either physically or mentally. Among them is the “Field of Honor” ceremony, where flags are dedicated to each visiting veteran, as well as other servicemen. This year, the field included nearly 3,000 flags. “We try to bring in as many as we can to let them know that they aren’t alone,” Kocian says. “We know what they did, and we’re thankful for it.”

Ron Kocian

Location: Northbrook, Ill.

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Mary Jo Quinn wants to break down barriers that keep Chicago residents from getting jobs. Her specialty? Helping clean up the records of people who have misdemeanors or felonies. Quinn, vice president and assistant general counsel with <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/allstate-89" target="_blank">Allstate</a> (No. 89), forged a partnership between the Illinois insurance giant and <a href="http://www.cgla.net">Cabrini Legal Aid</a> in 2010. Today, it is Allstate’s largest pro bono project, and more than 70 of the company’s attorneys volunteer work at the organization’s help desk in downtown Chicago. “When you have a criminal record, that doesn’t mean you were found guilty,” says Quinn. “It just means you were arrested.” Many people struggle to find employment, even if they’ve never been found guilty of a crime. “They just want to work,” she said.

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For those looking to scrub a felony from their records, the only path is to receive clemency from the governor. Allstate lawyers have taken up several clemency cases, and when Governor Pat Quinn (of no relation to Mary Jo) left office in 2014, he granted six out of the ten petitions that Allstate lawyers had penned. “Most of the people you meet, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Allstate’s Quinn. “When you’re living in poverty you’re in the wrong place more frequently.”

Mary Jo Quinn

Location: Abbott Park, Ill.

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For most people who like to run for a cause, a marathon is an achievement. But when Mike Sheehy’s friend was diagnosed with leukemia, he decided to go the extra mile (and then many more): he ran from San Diego to Phoenix, polishing off his run with a marathon in the Arizona city when he arrived. Over the course of those 17 days, he ran 500 miles and raised over $30,000 for cancer research. But Sheehy, who oversees technology purchases at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/abbott-laboratories-134" target="_blank">Abbott</a> (No. 134), the healthcare company, was just getting started: “I realized we needed to keep doing this, so I said, let’s go break the Guinness Book of World Records.” At the time, the record distance run in seven days was 350 miles, and Sheehy set out to beat that. On his next vacation, he ran the equivalent of two and a half marathons almost every day, allowing himself just five hours of sleep each night—a clip that blew the old mark out of the water. In all, he ran 408 miles and raised $50,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. “I’m just hopeful that I’ll find the lucky buck that makes the cure,” he says. He might not have achieved that yet, but his world record is still unbroken.

Mike Sheehy

Location: Clearwater, Fla.

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In 2006, after a career change and a divorce, Alicia Smith needed to get out of Detroit. She packed up her bags and her two German Shepherds for sunny Florida. Smith, a senior project manager at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/tech-data-107" target="_blank">Tech Data</a> (No. 107), began volunteering at the local animal shelter, where in the face of the recession, she saw countless families surrender their pets because they couldn’t afford their animals’ medical bills. Then, Smith, herself, received a bill for $500 for a routine medical visit for her two dogs—“Luckily I can afford that, not that I want to,” she says. “But I realized that so many people, like single moms, can’t afford a $500 vet bill.”

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In 2012, she founded <a href="http://caninecaretampabay.org">Canine Care Tampa Bay</a>, a non-profit organization that helps pet owners struggling to pay veterinary bills. Her first client was the owner of a Lhasa Apso named Simon. She had recently lost her job and was having trouble finding money to treat Simon’s skin condition. “Our goal is to get people over the hump,” Smith says. Many of her clients recently lost their jobs or are elderly people on fixed incomes whose pets are their only companions. Since starting Canine Care, Smith has helped 120 dogs and cats stay with their owners and receive the medications they need. “For a lot of our clients, their Chihuahua or Yorkie or Lab is their life,” she says. “All of us go through rough times at some point in our lives, and giving someone hope, that means so much.”

Alicia Smith

Location: Hillsboro, Ore.

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Less than two years after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, John Cartwright traveled to the country as an Intel Education Service Corp volunteer to help install a computer lab at a school called L’Ecole De Choix. There, Cartwright, who was then working in IT for Intel, and the team set up the necessary technology and installed an interactive computer program designed to teach children to read. Though Cartwright was initially skeptical that the English-only program would work with Creole-speaking students, he was amazed at how quickly the students picked up the language. When he returned from Haiti he asked to transfer to the educational group at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/intel-52" target="_blank">Intel</a> (No. 52) to work on the company’s education programs full-time, and he also took a sabbatical to focus on improving the software he had installed in the school in Haiti. He was able to ruggedize the program so that instead of running on servers in an air-conditioned room, it could work on a laptop attached to a car battery where electricity is not reliable. Since then, Cartwright has led teams of volunteers all over the world, including to Kenya and Nepal, to install the new and improved English-learning programs at seven schools. In order to fund the work, which Cartwright does outside his job at Intel, he founded a benefit corporation called <a href="http://www.justcoffeeandtea.com/">Just Coffee and Tea</a>. The charitable company sells tea and coffee that he sources from the regions where he installs the programs—and then roasts the coffee beans himself. “You get this spark, this fire,” says Cartwright of his volunteer efforts, “and it can’t help but be contagious.”

John Cartwright

Location: San Jose, Calif.

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For Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, who works in the design and implementation of corporate systems at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ebay-172" target="_blank">eBay</a> (No. 172), mountain climbing isn’t just a hobby—it’s healing. As a child in Peru, Vasquez-Lavado, a mountaineer, endured a period of sexual violence that would haunt her for much of her adult life. It wasn’t until she had the opportunity to trek to Mount Everest Base Camp in 2005 that she began to feel healed. She was not prepared to summit then, but she resolved to return—but only for a cause. Years later, in 2014, Vasquez-Lavado founded Courageous Girls, a non-profit group dedicated to helping victims of sexual violence find their own sense of peace and closure through trekking. “I decided to turn survivors into empowered people by helping them find that inner strength within themselves. It is so hard to do with so much shame inside of you,” she says. Vasquez-Lavado has already foot the bill for the first group of young women to make the journey. The women, all Nepalese, have been studying English, practicing meditation, and training for a climb up to Mount Everest Base Camp this fall. At that point, Vasquez-Lavado hopes to continue on to the top, as she promised herself she would a decade ago.

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

Location: East St. Louis, Ill.

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In June 2014, Tim Gruhlke, a special agent for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/csx-240" target="_blank">CSX</a> (No. 240), the international transportation company, was enjoying a vacation at Myrtle Beach. As he and his family packed up after a day at the pool, he heard a woman scream. Gruhlke ran over to find her panicking over her son’s body; he was on a lounge chair, and turning blue. The boy, Mitchell Burlin, had had a seizure in the pool, and his breathing had stopped. Grulkhe, who has worked in a variety of emergency response roles since he was 18, began administering CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, urging life into the small boy. Burlin slowly began to breathe and his eyes fluttered open. “Sorry I had to kiss you, little buddy,” Gruhlke told him. Burlin was rushed to the hospital, and Gruhlke went back to his hotel. “It wasn’t until I got to my room that I started bawling and lost it,” he says. It was his first time Gruhlke had responded to an emergency outside of work. “When you’re sitting at a pool in your swim trunks, with your kids, you aren’t expecting to jump in and save a life.” Since then, Gruhlke —“Uncle Tim” to Burlin—has kept in touch with the Burlins. Gruhlke, who also serves as president of the Missouri &amp; Illinois Railroad Police Association, nominated Burlin, a railroad enthusiast, to be an honorary member.

Tim Gruhlke

Location: Durham, N.C.

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When Diane Moore’s eight-year-old daughter, Colleen, was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2007, she was given only nine months to live. “We were not looking for research or cures, we were just looking for emotional support to get through this devastating diagnosis,” Moore, who helps oncology practices implement software applications through her job at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/mckesson-11" target="_blank">McKesson</a> (No. 11), says. But while first-class medical treatments were readily available, the psychosocial support that Moore and her daughter needed wasn’t there. Emotional support programs weren’t covered by insurance, and she wasn’t connected with any other parents of pediatric cancer patients. Even at one of the hospitals where Colleen was treated, which had a divinity school, no religious people came to visit, Moore says. She was forced to fill in as a therapist as well as a parent, helping her daughter to express her emotions in a journal; she consulted with a chaplain to learn how to explain death to a child.

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When Colleen passed away less than a year later, Moore decided to make the journey for other parents better than her own. Now, she serve on the board of directors for the Me Fine Foundation, which provides funding for emotional support services for children in hospitals in North Carolina, and as a business analyst for the Coalition Against Childhood Cancer’s HOPE Portal project. She also started a cancer support group, which has grown to include more than 200 families. “I know it’s volunteer work, but it doesn’t feel like work,” Moore says. “It feels like my daughter died and I can’t let that be the end. This is my way of letting her life have continued purpose.”

Diane Moore

Location: Savannah, Ga.

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In 1999, many parents in Savannah were dissatisfied with the public school system, and the relationship between community parents and the district was fraying. After speaking with parents around the community, O’Neal, a father of four children and a maintenance electrician with <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/international-paper-114" target="_blank">International Paper</a> (No. 114), realized that many of them just wanted to learn to be the best parents they could be. O’Neal’s training as an electrician gave him the tools to analyze and solve problems at work. “But as a parent,” he says, “I hadn’t had any training.”

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That year, he launched Parent University out of his living room, developing the curriculum through crowdsourcing: asking parents in his community what they wanted to know. About three or four Saturdays each year, O’Neal has held <a href="http://internet.savannah.chatham.k12.ga.us/schools/parentuniv/default.aspx">Parent University</a> events in Savannah offering 20-30 primers—on topics like how to help children with homework and how to interact with the school district—per day to participants. The first event attracted hundreds of parents. All are staged like a town fair, with raffles, food vendors and activities for the kids—and classes are now taught mostly by expert volunteers: college professors, high school teachers, and even the occasional lawyer for sessions like “Know your housing rights.”

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So successful was the endeavor that in 2012, Parent University merged with a philanthropic initiative called the Savannah Early Childhood Foundation, which teaches classes for parents with children age 0-5, to create the Early Learning College. Last year, the organization hosted four Parent University sessions and 12 Early Learning Colleges, which offer more specialized classes for parents of infants. “The most important thing is making the model engaging and making the environment feel safe and non-judgmental,” says O’Neal. “Parents don’t feel like they’re being talked down to, and they feel like they’re valued.” Since January, International Paper has awarded O’Neal a paid sabbatical so that he can scale up the program even further.

Michael O'Neal

Location: Largo, FL

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Five years ago, Kelly McDonald, who works in the supply chain department at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/raytheon-129" target="_blank">Raytheon</a> (No. 129), was an overweight chain smoker trying to kick the habit. One day, when she was craving a cigarette, she decided instead to take the rusty old Beach Cruiser bicycle in her garage for a spin. “I went not even a quarter of a mile, and I was literally sore for three days,” she says. But she kept cycling, and just a few years later, she was looking to go on a cycling tour for vacation. She stumbled upon <a href="https://ride2recovery.com" target="_blank">Ride 2 Recovery</a>, which organizes biking challenges, or multi-day rides, for veterans. Though not a veteran, McDonald rode in a challenge that year.

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The following year, she was partnered with Kathy Champion, a veteran who had lost her sight during her service in Iraq. Champion hadn’t been a cyclist, and they trained on a tandem bike for five months before the challenge, which involved a ride from New Orleans to Tallahassee. “I met a woman who was so closed up and not trusting, but for whatever reason, she trusted me to get on that bike,” McDonald says. “She started just coming to life.” The two rode every mile of the challenge together, with McDonald in the front to pilot, and Champion behind.

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That experience changed McDonald as well; she has since founded a local branch of the Project HERO program, a subsidiary of Ride 2 Recovery that organizes regular group bike rides for veterans and supporters across the country. Each week, she cycles with veterans, many of whom require adapted bikes for their disabilities or have PTSD in Pinellas county. “It’s hard to convey how deeply moving it is to watch people grow and transform right in front of your eyes,” McDonald told Fortune. “There’s nothing that special about me, but when someone asked if I would do something, I just said yes.”

Kelly McDonald

Location: Boca Raton, Fla.

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Sheri Daye, a 34-year veteran at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ibm-24" target="_blank">IBM</a> (No. 24) who now manages a group of Big Blue engineers, has traveled all over the world as a competitive free-dive spearfisher, and she holds multiple spearfishing world records. But Daye has another love, and that’s taking care of her adult brother, who has developmental disabilities. In 2006, when Daye became the president of her brother’s educational center, the Twin Palms Center for the Disabled, she realized she could bring both of her passions together. “I looked at their financials, and at the rate they were losing money, I figured they’d be closing the doors in two years,” she says. At the time, Daye was preparing for a national spearfishing tournament. She asked a few friends to give sideline seminars on various water sports; the entry fees paid by the 70 attendees, in turn, went straight to Twin Palms. Nine years later, these sideline seminars have evolved into a major water sports expo, attracting 4,500 people from around the globe—and raising more than $60,000 for Twin Palms in the process.

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Sheri Daye

Location: Stoneham, Mass.

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In 1990, Ray O’Brien and his wife adopted a daughter from Calcutta named Joanna Caitrin. When she was six, she asked O’Brien what India was like. He didn’t know what to say because he had first met Joanna at Boston Logan airport, when the girl was just an infant. “I realized I had no idea where she came from,” he tells Fortune. In 1996, the truck mechanic, who has worked for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ryder-system-407" target="_blank">Ryder</a> (No. 407) for 31 years, for the first time boarded a plane for India, where he visited the orphanage from which he had adopted Joanna Caitrin and a second child, Melissa. He returned from the trip feeling so shocked by the poverty he saw in that city that he decided to return every year. “It’s not a crime to be born and you’re part of earth’s family,” says O’Brien. “I think the world can do a little better for children to educate them and take care of their medical needs.” He founded the non-profit group <a href="http://childrenareangels.org" target="_blank">Children Are Angels from Heaven</a>, to collect donations of school supplies, walking canes, shoes and other supplies that he would deliver on his annual trip.

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O’Brien now visits Calcutta around Thanksgiving for three weeks every year. He visits local orphanages and schools, where he distributes as many as fifteen boxes full of donated supplies he’s collected and shipped to India. Children are Angels has also paid for two cleft lip operations and three eye surgeries for children that O’Brien has met on his visits. O’Brien and his family also adopted a severely handicapped child that he met at one of the orphanages. He named the child “Raymond.”

Ray O'Brien

Location: Atlanta, Ga.

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About fifty times a year, Paul Ruszczyk’s phone rings with a request from law enforcement in north and central Georgia: come soon, and bring the dogs. Paul Ruszczyk, a senior transmission engineer at Turner Broadcasting, a division of <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/time-warner-104" target="_blank">Time Warner</a>, is also the co-founder of the all-volunteer <a href="http://atsar.org" target="_blank">K-9 Alpha Search and Rescue Team</a>, which has been helping law enforcement locate missing people and bodies since 2004. The team of about 15 people are all trained in CPR, first aid and search and rescue, while the dogs specialize in cadaver search (locating scents associated with decaying bodies), tracking and trailing (following the path of a particular person’s scent) or air scent search (locating any human scent in an area). Initially, Paul volunteered as a dog handler; his black lab Barney, now retired, was a search and rescue dog. Today, Paul serves as a dog trainer for the team. “About half of the calls are for people who are already dead,” Paul says, adding, “a live find makes it all worth it.” But even when the search and rescue team locates a body, Paul says the work serves an essential purpose. “Part of it is the closure you bring to a family—whether you bring the person alive and dead, at least you bring that much.”

Paul Ruszczyk

Location: Atlanta, Ga.

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Around Christmas 2004, Patrice Eastham’s family friends were devastated to learn that their 15-year-old son, Ian, had brain cancer. Eastham, a vice president of business communications for insurance firm <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/assurant-285" target="_blank">Assurant</a> (No. 285), and a friend decided to put together a fundraiser focused on Ian’s favorite sport, skateboarding, to help the family pay the medical expenses. Though Ian passed away July 4, 2005, that September, the neighborhood came together for the first annual <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://www.skateraid.net" target="_blank">SkaterAid</a> festival. The event, which included skateboarding competitions, high school bands and an art car auction, was such a source of healing for Ian’s friends and family that Eastham decided to hold it every year.

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Since then, Eastham has organized ten of the festivals. “Skateboarders had the reputation of being kind of pesky in my neighborhood,” she said. “Over time, with SkaterAid, it’s shifted the reputation of these skateboarding kids to being really caring members of the community.” The festivals have raised more than $200,000 in total, with all of the money since 2006 going to the Georgia Chapter of the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation’s Butterfly Fund, which helps other families pay medical bills incurred from pediatric brain cancer.

Patrice Eastham

Location: Sao Paolo, Brazil

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When Tlaca Benavides began working at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/dow-chemical-48" target="_blank">Dow Chemical</a> (No. 48) in Mexico City, he didn’t tell his coworkers he was gay. But when Benavides’s supervisor offered him a move and a promotion in 2012—suggesting that, as a single man, he was well-positioned to relocate— Benavides decided he needed to come out and explain he was in a serious relationship with a man. “I had been hiding it for three years and I felt so pressured,” the marketing manager says. His boss’ response was hardly the one he had feared: “His reaction was, ‘I’m pleased to know you have someone in your life,’ and I was so relieved.”

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Though Dow had several employee chapters of GLAD (Gay, Lesbians and Allies at Dow), across North America and Europe, the group hadn’t gained traction in the chemical company’s Latin America offices. Hoping to prevent his colleagues from suffering the same anxiety over their sexual orientation, Benavides launched Dow’s GLAD network in Latin America in 2012, and later, when he moved to Sao Paolo with his partner, he founded a chapter there. Membership in the group has grown from five Dow employees to 230 across the region. Benavides is also working with other multinational corporations to raise LGBT awareness and acceptance in Latin America, and it was his efforts that in 2014 led Dow to host more than 200 representatives from companies including Google and General Electric in Sao Paolo to discuss advancing LGBT rights in the workplace.

Tlaca Benavides

Location: New York, N.Y.

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Chris Pilkerton, a compliance director at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/jp-morgan-chase-21" target="_blank">JP Morgan Chase</a> (No. 21), and his wife, Amanda, were already thinking about adoption in Oct. 2014, when news started to come from Ebola-stricken countries of a flood of orphans left in the disease’s wake. They reached out to a Liberia-based NGO called Orphan Concern, run by a man named Amos Sawboh, to see how they could help. Because of the moratorium on international adoptions in the country put in place in 2009, the Pilkertons knew that adoption wasn’t an immediate option. Instead, they organized a drive in their apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, collecting 600 pounds of clothes and food for Liberian orphans. When Sawboh told the couple about the unemployed Liberian man who was suddenly caring for some 20 orphans in his village, the Pilkertons were especially moved. Chris organized another drive at JP Morgan, this time amassing more than 2,000 pounds of supplies for Liberian orphans. He hopes to double that amount at his next collection drive, this time in a JP Morgan office in Ohio, by the end of June.

Chris Pilkerton

Location: Springfield and Boston, Mass.

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Every Thursday across Massachusetts, landlords and tenants converge on their local courthouses for “Eviction Day.” They’re joined by an army of volunteer lawyers—in large part thanks to the work of Dorothy Varon, assistant vice-president and counsel at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/massachusetts-mutual-life-insurance-94" target="_blank">Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance</a> (No. 94), and Kathy McGrath, senior corporate counsel at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/liberty-mutual-insurance-group-78" target="_blank">Liberty Mutual Insurance Group</a> (No. 78). Working independently, the two attorneys have helped make the Massachusetts version of the pro bono legal defense program called “Lawyer for a Day” a much-heralded success. Each got her company to devote ample resources to the effort, which offers residents who can’t afford an attorney qualified legal help that can keep them in their homes during an eviction proceeding. “The idea is to reduce homelessness,” Dorothy says.

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The volunteer lawyers, who focus on different parts of the state—MassMutual concentrates its effort on the Springfield area, Liberty Mutual works in Boston—try to mediate disputes so that their clients can either remain in their homes, stretch the time before they are evicted, or reduce the back rent owed. In one of Varon’s cases, for example, a disabled veteran taking care of her severely disabled son was being evicted due to her hoarding problem. Dorothy was able to work with services through the Housing Court to help the veteran keep her home and receive the social services she needed. “Without a lawyer, she never would have known that they were trying to switch gears on her, and she wouldn’t have been able to put up [an appropriate] defense,” Varon says.

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McGrath, for her part, has also started bringing colleagues in the Liberty’s law department to volunteer at homeless shelters in Boston, helping some qualify for public housing. The two attorneys, who have become friends, are fierce advocates of pro bono work: Varon started Mass Mutual’s internal pro bono program in 2007 soon after she arrived at the company; McGrath is responsible for five of the seven pro bono programs her company now has. Both are recipients of the Adams Pro Bono Publico Awards for their service in the state.

Dorothy Varon and Kathy McGrath

Location: Louisville, Ky.

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Justin Gordon didn’t grow up with much, but he always had presents under the Christmas tree. When he started working at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/kroger-20" target="_blank">Kroger</a> (No. 20), the supermarket chain, the store manager was dismayed to learn that many of his coworkers and customers found themselves too financially stretched to buy gifts for their own kids. That year, 2006, Gordon organized a fundraising drive and cookout that brought in enough money to give 85 children gifts for the holiday. Now called the Broadway Christmas Project, Justin has made community gift-giving an annual tradition at Kroger. By connecting with local schools, Gordon finds families who need extra help during the Christmas season—and makes a concerted effort to give the kids the presents on their wish list, even if it’s a laptop or bike. (One gift he couldn’t deliver was for a little girl who asked for her grandmother to have a day off from work.) A little before Christmas, Gordon invites the families and children to Louisville’s Metro United Way Building—the project has outgrown the Kroger breakroom where the gift-giving used to be held—for a day of pizza and activities. The store manager and his co-workers, who have helped more than 700 families in the community wake up to presents under the tree, even load the wrapped gifts into the parents’ cars.

Justin Gordon

Location: Asheville, N.C.

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Jonathan Greene, an area manager for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/suntrust-banks-327" target="_blank">SunTrust Banks</a> (No. 327), isn’t big on the idea of a quiet home. He grew up with 13 siblings, and with only three biological children of his own, he knew there was room for more. In 1995, Greene and his wife opened their Florida home to foster children, hosting one girl with special needs for four years and another dozen children for several weeks at a time. When the family moved to Virginia about six years later, Bedford County asked the Greenes to serve as an assessment home—a place that hosts each new child that enters the system and helps to determine their needs. In that capacity, the Greenes fostered more than 175 children over a ten-year period. Meanwhile, the family also served as a haven for rescue dogs. “It was a good mix to have the dogs being rescued with the foster children,” Greene says. “The dogs have a way of helping children that go through trauma.” In the past 14 years, he and his wife have fostered more than 200 children and rescued and placed over 300 animals. As for their first foster child, he says, “that’s one of our proudest things to talk about.” She graduated from college and now works as a social worker.

Jonathan Greene

Location: Columbus, Ga.

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At the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Aflac Cancer Center, children walk the halls wearing stacks of beaded necklaces. Each bead, provided through the organization <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://www.beadsofcourage.org" target="_blank">Beads of Courage</a>, represents a procedure that the child went through, giving the kids a sense of ownership and progress as they undergo their treatments. The program at this center is solely funded by a coin drive started by James Mailman, a field liaison manager for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/aflac-132">Aflac</a> (No. 132). Mailman, whose wife is a cancer survivor, wanted to do something for the children he had seen going through rough treatment protocols, just as his wife had endured. “When you see a small child—I mean a little baby—having chemotherapy going through their veins, it’s hard to imagine.”

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Each year, the drive raises $12,000 for the Beads of Courage program, plus extra funding that goes toward the Cancer Center’s wish list. One year, the overflow money went towards buying a rocking chair for every hospital room after Mailman heard about a grandfather who wasn’t allowed to hold his grandson because nurses were afraid he’d drop the baby. Another year, the extra money went to a foosball table for the older kids. Since 2004, Mailman has raised more than $262,000 for the center.

James Mailman

Location: San Antonio, Texas

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Kari Miller believes in the power of sports to rehabilitate mind and body. Since she lost parts of both of her legs in 1999 while on reserve in the Army, it has become her life’s work. During Miller’s own recovery, she played adaptive basketball, then volleyball. In 2006, she joined the U.S. National Sitting Volleyball Team, which went on to win silver in Beijing and London. Now, Miller, a retired sergeant who served with the U.S. Army, helps other veterans recover with adaptive sports: Her employer, <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/lockheed-martin-64" target="_blank">Lockheed Martin</a> (No. 64), has dispatched Miller to work with the Air Force’s Wounded Warriors program, where she serves as a community coordinator and head coach of the Air Force sitting volleyball team. “It’s rewarding to show folks what they can do,” Miller says. “I tell them, ‘You didn’t even think about doing this, but because I forced you, now it’s part of your life.’”

Kari Miller

Location: Mayfield Village, Ohio

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Many students, especially girls, don’t have role models in computer science to make the field accessible. Rachel Wilkins Patel grew up as one of those girls in rural Ohio, and as an IT professional now working with insurance company <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/progressive-153" target="_blank">Progressive</a> (No. 153) in the Cleveland area, Wilkins Patel wants to make sure that young girls have a chance to pursue a career in industry she loves. About eight years ago, she held a web development workshop for 50 girls and she was surprised to find that many of their questions weren’t about web development, but rather about her personal life in the industry. “The girls had more questions about whether they could actually have a job in this field,” Wilkins Patel says. That’s when she decided to take her effort to the next level. In 2010, Wilkins Patel founded HER Ideas in Motion to hold regular workshops and tech clubs in partnership with Cleveland-area schools and companies. This past school year, her group held 12 workshops and tech clubs, covering IT, game design, filmmaking, programming and other topics. Most of the girls who attend have no experience with computer technology, either due to a lack of tech-related curricula at their schools or a lack of encouragement. Over the years, she has worked with hundreds of middle-school-aged girls and their parents, opening up their minds to careers in tech. “We try to let them know that these are really viable options that offer them a great work-life balance,” she says.

Rachel Wilkins Patel

Location: San Francisco, Calif.

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When Typhoon Hainan devastated the Philippines in Nov. 2013, people around the world watched the news with horror. But few were moved to respond like Jeff Stecyk, a sales engineering senior manager for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/sandisk-408" target="_blank">SanDisk</a> (No. 408) in San Francisco. “My mother is originally from Leyte in the Philippines, and seeing those images, those people felt like my family,” Stecyk says. He and his wife traveled to Tacloban, Leyte’s capital, less than a year after the typhoon to discover ruined infrastructure and makeshift graves dotting the landscape. Through a non-profit called Go Abroad, the Stecyks volunteered with Mission Tacloban, which found the perfect assignment for the couple: teaching elementary school students about technology. When Stecyk returned home two weeks later, he spoke with his bosses at SanDisk about donating laptops and other equipment to the Tacloban schools. SanDisk was quick to comply, contributing more than 25 refurbished machines. Stecyk, on his own, collected another 25 and flew back to the battered region. SanDisk continues to ship refurbished laptops to Tacloban. So far, Stecyk and his employer have provided 20 schools with computers.

Jeff Stecyk

Location: Queens, N.Y.

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Tim Russo had never really known anyone with autism before. But in September 2013, when he was volunteering at JetBlue’s Blue Horizon for Autism event, which lets families with autistic kids experience the airport in a controlled setting, he found himself getting along effortlessly with his fellow volunteer, an autistic teenager named Jason Harris. “We started talking about aircraft routing and pairing,” Tim says. “Just by looking at the tail number of a plane, he knew the name of the plane. That’s what I do for a living—I remember thinking, this is fun!” Russo, who manages strategic initiatives within Technical Operations for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/jetblue-airways-454" target="_blank">JetBlue</a> (No. 454), gave Harris his contact information.
Russo has been in touch with Harris every day since, answering his constant questions about aviation over text and email. "I know it sounds unbelievable," Deb Harris, Jason's mom, says. "But they talk every single day about flight patterns and JetBlue." Now, Harris is taking flying lessons so that he can realize his dream of becoming a commercial pilot. But Russo has made sure to introduce his mentee to the whole aviation world: In April, Russo took Harris and his family on a multi-day tour of the JetBlue headquarters and JFK airport, introducing him to all of the teams that work behind the scenes to keep the company running. "That was a magical day for me," Jason Harris says. Russo – and many other employees at JetBlue who have gotten to know Jason, now 16, over the years – is working with the Harris family to discuss Jason’s career path, and his promising future in aviation. “This experience has been so uplifting for Jason since he's at the stage in his life where he's trying to figure out what he's going to do as an adult," Deb Harris says. "Tim has given us strong direction and a lot of support."

Timothy Russo

Location: New York, N.Y.

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In the past eight years, Eric Gelber, an executive vice president at the commercial real estate firm <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/cbre-group-321" target="_blank">CBRE</a> (No. 321), has run more than four marathons, 20 ultra marathons and three unofficial runs exceeding 155 miles each—all for a cause he believes in. In 2007, his friend Anita, who was fighting multiple myeloma, was undergoing her first stem cell transplant. He decided to run the New York City marathon in her honor, raising $6,000 for the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation. But Gelber wanted to do more. “People tend to donate more to extreme events,” he says. “So I try to do something a little crazier every year.” In September 2013, he ran around Central Park in New York City for 48 hours straight, covering about 164 miles. The following year, he did it again, plus another 12 miles—that time raising over $230,000. This year, on June 6, Gelber did a 12-hour “training run” in Central Park in preparation for his major event: the Badwater ultra-marathon in Death Valley. Though Anita passed away three years ago, Gelber’s runs for the MMRF have connected him to a much larger network of people suffering from the blood cancer. “So many people are fighting this disease, and they don’t have a choice,” Gelber says. “What I do is nothing in comparison.”

Eric Gelber

Location: Clearwater, Fla.

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<a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/ups-47" target="_blank">UPS</a> (No. 47) delivery drivers Joe Clement and Noel Keesling have been friends for 25 years. So, when Keesling—a former Marine and triathlete—became sick and needed a new kidney, Clement knew he needed to see if he was a match. “To see him every day with his head down like that, well, it wasn’t a big deal.” The day after he got his results, Clement approached Keesling and told him the good news. “What’d you do that for?” his friend asked, shocked. The transplant occurred April 1, 2015, and the two men recovered together, watching reruns of Friends. For Keesling, the kidney offers a new lease on life. “I was so over doing dialysis. Once I got a new kidney, I felt great,” he says. “I feel like I could run a marathon.”

Noel Keesling and Joe Clement

Location: Bangalore, India

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For Manoj Cherian, a Bangalore-based security manager at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/qualcomm-113" target="_blank">Qualcomm</a> (No. 113), doing good is a family affair. In 2008, when his brother-in-law, Joey, decided to start <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://www.jeevarathni.org" target="_blank">Jeevarathni</a>, a shelter for impoverished and homeless children in Tamil Nadu, a state in Southeast India, the whole family got on board. Cherian’s sister, Meena, and her husband moved there from the U.S. to help manage the site, and Cherian worked closely with them to support Jeevarathni from his nearby home in Bangalore. The family bought a two-acre plot and built six homes for children surrounding an administrative building, where Meena and her husband would live. The first three children arrived at the shelter in August 2010; it’s now home to 35 children.

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Jeevarathni employs four house “mothers”—women previously living in poverty—to care for the children and run each home of ten. Cherian visits the campus many weekends a year, substitutes for Meena and her husband, and hosts children in his Bangalore home. The organization has also provided funding for the local public school to hire another teacher. For the children living at Jeevarathni, many of whom were once forced to beg on the streets, the organization provides a way out of poverty. “We hope to give them a foundation,” Cherian says. “If any kids have potential to go to college, we will help them to do that, too.”

Manoj Cherian

Location: Plano, Texas

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When Bruce Graham, a Navy veteran, visited the Dallas VA hospital through a small project with other local vets to bring Valentine’s Day cards to the patients, he was shocked by the number of suffering veterans. “As a veteran myself, I did my time, and then life went on,” says Graham, who manages the watch inventory for <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/jc-penney-250" target="_blank">J.C. Penney</a> (No. 250). “I got a family, I got a job, and I had forgotten.”

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Disturbed by the number of veterans who were not only injured by their service, but also homeless, Graham decided to organize a coat drive for the hospital. Since then, he’s collected and hand-delivered more than 1,200 coats from his colleagues and J.C. Penney’s overstock—enough outerwear to pass along to the hospital’s satellite facilities, too. But there’s one image that Graham still can’t shake from his initial visit to the hospital when he was interrupted in conversation by a veteran asking for a coat. “I stood next to this gentleman who served this country, and all he wanted was for something to keep him warm.”

Bruce Graham

Location: Orlando, Fla.

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For the youth at the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida, Mark Cavalleri is the guy who’s always there. A manager at <a style="color:#ec412e;" href="http://fortune.com/fortune500/guardian-life-ins-co-of-america-254">Guardian Life Insurance</a> (No. 254), Cavalleri created a flag football team at the center four years ago. Almost every Saturday of the year, he takes children to a local park to play flag football or do arts and crafts. Since the shelter doesn't always have the ability to give the kids lunch on weekends, Cavalleri often brings pizza of barbeques for the participating kids—who total as many as 60 on any given Saturday. Even though most children stay at the shelter for only a few months before moving on, some continue to attend the Saturday activities even after leaving the shelter.

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Members of the flag football teams range in age from five to 18, and Cavalleri—or “coach Mark,” as the kids call him—runs them alongside his other volunteers in the spirit of an avuncular high school coach. “I realized we’re doing more than just playing flag football,” Cavalleri says. “We use football as a springboard to instill lessons in life: Put the team first, work hard, and respect each other.” Beyond creating the program, which is the most popular volunteer program at the coalition, Cavalleri has raised more than $12,000 for the coalition through an annual golf event. He also keeps track of the kids’ grades, awarding $20 to those who get straight A’s. Once, he got a text from one of the kids saying that he had made the honor roll for the first time in his family’s history. When the school held an honors banquet, Mark was there.

Mark Cavalleri

Top 10

Nearly 27 million people go to work for the Fortune 500 companies every day. We found 55 of them—sometimes working together—whose extraordinary acts of bravery, kindness and selflessness are changing people’s lives. Read more about our second annual list here.

Heroes of the 500