About Be what's possible

Here at Gap Inc., we focus our investments on youth in the developed world and women in the developing world. Our mission to create opportunities that unleash potential is made even more powerful by the work we do to support our nonprofit partners and employee volunteers. Learn more about our strategy for making a positive impact in the community.

Youth
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This Way Ahead

Our signature program This Way Ahead inspires underserved young people in San Francisco and New York City to explore careers, build confidence and develop skills to find and keep jobs. Along with our nonprofit partners, our employee volunteers bring their knowledge of the working world to the classroom. They lead discussions that challenge and engage students to focus on goals. Their efforts have paid off. So far, more than 75 percent of students who have completed the program demonstrate improvement in job attainment skills. Learn More

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Designed in partnership with the Pearson Foundation, Plan Ahead is a semester-long ninth grade college and career awareness course that works to improve the futures of nearly 4,000 young people a year in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). During 75 hours of graduation-required coursework, students learn everything from "What am I good at?" to plotting out a path to a career, college and life after high school. Learn More

Women
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In 2007, we launched the Gap Inc. P.A.C.E. (Personal Advancement & Career Enhancement) program, aimed at educating female garment workers in technical and social skills so they can advance further in work and in life. Designed in partnership with the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and Swasti Health Resource Center, the program currently operates in Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, India, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. More than 7,500 women have participated in P.A.C.E. training and the results are impressive: in our pioneer factory, women who completed P.A.C.E. were promoted nearly 5 times more often than other female workers at the same factory. Learn More

Service
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In 2009, we launched the Gap Inc. Leadership Initiative to help build even better leaders at our youth-serving nonprofit partners. What we do and how we do it is both simple and effective. We take the programs and curriculum we use to develop our own company’s leaders and turn them into holistic programs that meet the needs of our partners. Our Human Resources and Learning & Development employees partner with CompassPoint, a nonprofit consulting firm with expertise in capacity building, to adapt our internal tools and lend support as facilitators and coaches. Nonprofit leaders who participated in the first year of the initiative showed statistically significant gains in leadership capacity, including areas such as delegating responsibility and leveraging data for decision-making. Learn More

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More than 2,500 Gap Inc. employees around the world have taken part in our Community Leader program, which encourages self-starters to head up their teams’ volunteerism efforts in the community. “Being a Community Leader is an opportunity to bring a variety of our employees together at events and to do things together as a team,” said Heidi Monge, Operations Manager for Gap brand. “Because we’re doing a lot of skills-based volunteering, employees use their professional skills to benefit nonprofits. You can really watch your involvement and impact over the course of time. Usually, once employees experience it, they’re pretty hooked. After volunteering one time, most employees will sign up again (and again).” Learn More