A Year in Review With Heart to Heart

The following excerpt is taken for the book, The Power of Serviing Others: You Can Start Where you Are.  Heat to Heart founder, Dr. Gary Morsch discusses how is organization's relationship with FedEx began.

"Our relationship with FedEx began with the Vietnam airlift.  I had spoken to a Rotary Group in Kansas City about Heart to Heart's desier to serve the people in Vietnam, telling the Rotarians the only thing preventing us from doing it was getting the supplies there.  It was a risky project in the first place.  I had been hearing about the suffering of the Vietnamese people, where hospitals didn't have enough supplies to treat the high poverty regions, and clinics were re-using bandages, syringes, and other items that were spreading disease.  A man in the audience suggested I speak to another group he belonged to - a group of veterans.  A few weeks later I told the veterans what Heart to Heart was trying to do and one of the vets said, "I know a man with airplanes".  It turned out the man he was referring to was Fred Smith, the CEO of FedEx.  I was not encouraged by the conversation, because I had approached FedEx before and my ideas never got past the first level.  But this vet had been in a Marine Corps unit with Fred Smith. In Vietnam.  He said he'd write Smith a letter.  Within days my phone rang, It was Fred Smith.  "How soon do you want to go to Vietnam?" he asked.  The first commercial plane from the United States to land in Vietnam after the war was a FedEx plane loaded with medical supplies for people we used to call enemies."

This was 1995.  Now, FedEx has shipped humanitarian and medical aid to 40 countries in 2008 alone.  Reaching 182 organizations.  Impressively, the total AWP Value shipped is $14,112,203.