Audible Employees Worldwide Find Meaning in Showing Up for Others

On a weekday in May, a program manager at Audible, Mauro Balcazar, found himself standing in a room at Newark’s FOCUS community center, across the street from our headquarters, trying to explain how to apply a face mask to a group of senior men. Balcazar recalls telling them, “It's going to feel weird, but it's fine.” The masks were part of a “spa day” intended to foster connection and lift spirits through fun wellness activities. By the end of the afternoon, he and his coworkers were doing manicures and drawing with their neighborhood elders while trading stories about their lives. “It felt like we were hanging out with our own grandparents,” he beams.

That was one of many moments that comprised Audible's inaugural Global Impact Week, several days of programming and volunteer events that brought our worldwide employees together for a shared purpose: to live out our People Principle of “Activate Caring.”

“Global Impact Week is meant to amplify our decades-long commitment to economic and social impact,” explains Aisha Glover, Audible's Global Head of Urban Innovation. As part of that commitment, Audible employees donate their time and talents in a number of ways throughout the year, including mentoring, supporting small businesses, tutoring students, volunteering with charitable organizations, and more. “While ‘Activate Caring’ is a year-round commitment that permeates our ethos, we wanted to create a distinct moment where this principle can be celebrated across the company, and to give employees an opportunity to plug into one of the many ways to engage,” says Glover.

In a live broadcast to employees tuning in from our hubs around the world, Emmy-, Grammy- and Oscar-winning artist Common sat down for a fireside chat with Glover. He shared about storytelling as a form of social justice, his work with incarcerated people, and how programs like Inside Stories, Audible's initiative with National Literacy Trust and National Prison Radio that teaches incarcerated youth in the UK about podcast production, open pathways to healing. What gives him hope, he said, is seeing people “doing the work, not just talking about it,” including corporations using “power and access to make change.”

Common, who worked with Audible to record his Words + Music title, Bluebird Memories: A Journey Through Lyrics & Life, live at the Minetta Lane Theatre in February 2020, was chosen to kick off Global Impact Week because, as Glover says, “Common embodies the intersection of artistry and social justice, and explores how we can use our voices, whether through storytelling, technology, or community engagement, as vehicles for meaningful change."

After the fireside chat, employees rolled up their sleeves and got to work. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, teams packed food at a community center, while in Los Angeles, employees assembled teddy bears for children in transitional housing. Berlin held a translation hackathon and cleaned up a local primary school. Tokyo supported meal prep at a community café. In Newark, in addition to the afternoon at FOCUS, employees wrote to seniors through Letters Against Isolation, cleaned up Branch Brook Park, and read to children at Nelson Mandela Elementary School. And there were many more projects taking place at Audible hubs around the world.

Balcazar says the experience unlocked something unexpected in him. As the elders shared stories of coming to the United States decades ago, and the things they’d learned from their lives, he found himself thinking about being present and not taking the current moment for granted. “It felt like I was doing something truly worthwhile,” he says.

In Chennai, India, Vithya Venkatachalam had a similar response. In addition to being a senior engineer working to support Audible’s service, Venkatachalam is her hub’s community ambassador, so she helped organize events for the week. She participated in two of them: STEM on Wheels, where employees brought a mobile lab to underprivileged students and guided them through hands-on science experiments and workbooks, and the Money Smart Wall, where the team built an interactive financial literacy board for children covering concepts like saving, budgeting and goal planning.

“The curiosity in their eyes when the experiments worked, the questions they asked, the excitement when something clicked, all of that stayed with me,” she says. At the end of the STEM day, the children wrote thank-you cards for the volunteers. “Holding that little handwritten card felt like the most meaningful keepsake I could carry back home,” Venkatachalam says. “It's still with me.”

Employees supporting Audible’s service for Brazil also had a meaningful experience helping children in need. Over the last year, Audible has collaborated with the nonprofit organization Beaba to create an audiobook that helps demystify over 160 oncology terms for young patients and their families, and together we set up a library in the hospital that includes this and other helpful Audible titles. During Global Impact Week, employees created “comfort kits” for patients, with friendship bracelets, drawing materials and hand-made puzzle games, each accompanied by a personal note from the employee who made it. “It was the kind of activity that brings a team together,” says Joana De Conti, an associate director of publisher relations working from São Paulo.

For De Conti, the week affirmed something she hadn't expected when she joined Audible. She'd always wanted to do more social impact work, but the time for it had never quite materialized. “To work at a company this huge, and to find the space is there for you to do that kind of activity is really remarkable,” she says.

The three employees agree that they walked away from the week with a better sense of the ease with which they can get involved in Audible’s impact work through ongoing volunteer opportunities, whether mentoring youth and people interested in tech careers, pitching in at nonprofits and schools, and more, no matter where in the world they’re working from.

That awareness was exactly what Glover and her team hoped to engender with Global Impact Week. “We wanted to create space for all of us to celebrate our commitment to ‘Activate Caring’ and help exemplify what a company can mean beyond what it does,” Glover says. “We wanted all of us to feel included, empowered and proud.”