Nikki Clifton leads UPS’s global philanthropy, social impact, and international community affairs, leveraging the company’s partnerships and logistical acumen to respond to the world’s most pressing social, humanitarian, and environmental needs. Bringing nearly three decades of litigation, legislative affairs, and philanthropic expertise to her role, Nikki oversees The UPS Foundation’s work delivering health and humanitarian aid, eliminating systemic barriers to economic opportunity, building local capacity, and advancing sustainability around the world.
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John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today, Nikki Clifton. She’s the president of Social Impact at the UPS Foundation. Welcome, Nikki to the Impact Podcast.
Nikki Clifton: Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.
John: It’s great to have you, and before we get going to all the important and impactful things you’re doing in social impact at the UPS Foundation with your colleagues, can you share a little bit with our listeners and our viewers, the Nikki Clifton story? Where did you grow up? How did you get on this fascinating and important journey that you’re on, and who inspired you? Share a little bit about your own background, please.
Nikki: Sure. You know, John, I always say that Leading the foundation is my favorite job, but this was not a straight line to heading up this wonderful organization and working with this great team. I was born in Washington D.C., but I grew up in Athens, Georgia. So Go Dawgs.
John: Go Dawgs”.
Nikki: I am a product of two amazing parents, Aaron and Patricia Clifton. I’ve lost both of my parents unfortunately, but they have left me with so much in terms of service and a heart for giving back. They were both educators. My mom was a middle school principal. My dad was an academic dean at the University of Georgia and he was also a farmer. So, I come from parents who were both first generation college students, and they taught me the importance of education. I moved between Washington D.C. and Athens, Georgia three times. I went to Howard University and graduated with a degree in communications. Then I moved back to the University of Georgia to get my JD. So, I’m a labor and employment lawyer by trade. I call myself a recovering lawyer. So, eventually, I moved between practicing law and coming to UPS as a labor employment attorney. I thought I would be at UPS for three years and go back into the law firm, but I fell in love with the company. I fell in love with its values, with its heart for service, the fact that it’s reliable. It’s a great brand. We’re celebrating 117 years of being in existence, and I’m just really proud to be a UPSer.
John: As I was sharing with you off the air, I’m 62 now, and there’s not a time that the UPS drivers used to come to my home in Queens, New York, where I wasn’t excited about seeing them and being excited to get what they were bringing me. Feeling safe that those drivers when they walked up that they always had a smile and a kind thing to say, and were super nice people.
Nikki: Well, I will tell you that it is a lot around our values and the training that we give to our drivers. I actually had to drive the UPS truck for three months, even though I’m a lawyer. When I was in government affairs, we all had to deliver and we deliver during Christmas. Let me tell you, I’ve two kids. They were so excited to see me in that brown uniform. They thought I was just going to ride along, but I told them, “No, I am driving. I have a route.” So I’ve got to be in the community and learned how hard it is to deliver those packages. Not only are they heavy, but we deliver each one with care, like, it’s our only package. I’ve got a lot of respect for the men and women in the brown uniforms.
John: Was it hard to drive that truck?
Nikki: Well, it wasn’t hard for me because I grew up driving tractors.
John: Oh, so you’re the farmer’s daughter, that actually he taught you how to drive a tractor.
Nikki: He did. My dad taught me how to drive a tractor. So, there is a bit of a difference between driving a tractor and a 10, 000 pound vehicle, but I knew how to drive a stick shift. We were trained.
John: Got you.
Nikki: I went to training with UPS, learned safety and learned the message. It is a science. We really are an engineering company, a tech company that has service at its heart. So doing that really much respect and insight for what we do in the community.
John: I’m always fascinated by how, when parents create wonderfully successful children, the messaging that the parents give the children. So both of my children are up here. They are about 18 years old. Now, they’re 31 and 38. Both of them are lawyers like you. My wife who’s over here. We started messaging very young for them to become lawyers. When did your parents, who are educators, but the first college educated people in their family, when did they start messaging you? Was it an overt messaging to you that, “Hey, we went to college, but you’re going to do better, and you’re going to get a master’s degree, or some sort of PhD or JD or MBA”, or was it more of a covert approach to encouraging you in that direction?
Nikki: No. I was in no ambiguous first told that I would be going to college.
John: Good.
Nikki: But education is the key to opportunity. My parents demonstrated that every day. Reading was a priority in our family. We read the newspaper. We talked about what was going on in the world at the dinner table. My mom was a teacher, and so she was at home by about 4 or 5 o’clock in the afternoon. My dad came home, and we sat around the table and talked. I was an only child for 13 years until my sister was brought into the world. So for 13 years, it was just me and my parents.
John: Wow.
Nikki: So education was drilled into me every single day, and my sister is successful too. So proud of her. She’s the COO of a healthcare company in Denver, Colorado.
John: Oh, so it’s a success all over, and it comes from just your parents, just nurturing and loving, but also coaching and mentoring that education is the way to go.
Nikki: Absolutely, They walk the talk for sure. There’s no question.
John: What was the tipping point? Who inspired you, or who pushed you or nudge you, or a little bit of both inspiration and pushing or nudging? Who pulled you into law? How did you get the law bug?
Nikki: I’m going to be honest about that. That was an accident. I went to Howard to be Oprah Winfrey. I wanted to go into broadcast journalism.
John: Wow.
Nikki: I loved communications, but the more that I learned about the communications field, my parents kept saying, “You’ve got to have a job at the end of this.”
John: Got it.
Nikki: So you need some options, and you need to figure out how you can launch your love of communication into something that will have you a guaranteed job. I wasn’t quite sure how to bridge that gap around my junior year in college, but I loved advocacy. I had been in public speaking growing up. I’d been in an organization called 4-H, a wonderful youth organization. I’d done public speaking in 4-H. So I just really started thinking about what I could do that combines my gift of gab with being academically oriented and service. I decided to study, and I wasn’t really sure how it was going to work out. I didn’t have parents who are lawyers.
John: Got it.
Nikki: But what I did was to make sure that I went back to a law school that I could afford. I tell kids all the time, “When you’re thinking about navigating your career, if they’re uncertain, if you manage your debt, you can make smart decisions.” So, I went to the University of Georgia, a great public institution. I could afford to pay for it, and it had a great reputation. I fell into labor and employment law because it was that sweet spot of people and understanding how people tick, and their workplace and being able to advocate to help companies really learn how to treat people. To make sure that employees knew what the expectations were within the confines of the legal framework. I went into being a labor and employment lawyer.
John: That’s awesome. My daughter is a labor and employment lawyer. My brother is as well. So our family knows that sector of the law quite well. It’s a great area of the law. It actually [crosstalk]
Nikki: It really is. It’s recession proof.
John: Yeah.
Nikki: It’s recession proof, but also, it’s part psychology because people bring so much of who they are into work. So if you can get the sweet spot of being a people-focused employer, or a people-focused center, then you can really get discretionary effort out of people and have great teams. Because great places like UPS really are built off of teams. People are the center of what we do.
John: That’s so true. Collaboration and teamwork is so important. Talk a little bit about, let’s just talk macro, about UPS for our listeners and viewers who don’t know the size and scope of UPS. To find UPS and to find, by the way, Nikki and all her colleagues at UPS, you go to www.ups.com. Annual revenue, north of $89 billion with a B.
Nikki: That’s right.
John: Employees; over 500,000 employees. Countries; you’re in over 220 countries. As you said, you’ve been around since 1907, so that’s 117 years of just building a wonderful business that serves so many people around the world so well. Talk a little bit about the UPS Foundation. When was it created and what’s its macro mission, and what areas of impact were you brought on to effectuate?
Nikki: Absolutely. Well, UPS is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Our foundation was started about 73 years ago in 1951 by our founder, Jim Casey. So, Jim Casey founded UPS in Seattle Washington, and he started this organization really from a heart of service trying to determine what his community needed. It needed the waverly of goods in a safe and reliable way. He started out with a couple of bikes, and it grew into the global company that we are today. The foundation was really instituted to give back some of the company’s revenue to invest it back into the community where we serve. So for more than 70 years, we’ve given more than $3 billion to communities globally.
John: Wow.
Nikki: Our philanthropic approach centers on four areas. Health and humanitarian relief, equity and economic empowerment, local community engagement which is volunteering, and planet protection, which was designed to help offset our impact to the globe as the transportation provider. We always say that at UPS, giving means more than writing a check. We want to combine the company’s logistics expertise and our transportation reach with our employees skills, with their passions, and with their volunteer time to make a difference in society. So we’ve got a moonshot goal, John. We want to positively impact the wellbeing of one billion people by 2040. One billion with a B. We want to return 30 million volunteer hours to our communities by 2030. We want to plant 50 million trees by 2030, and we’re on a mission to do it.
John: Holy Toledo. Okay. So, let’s break it down. Why don’t we go through those four areas that you just laid our for us as the poor fillers. Let’s walk through each one, and talk about what you’re doing in each of those areas that you’re most excited about.
Nikki: Well, I’m really excited in helping humanitarian relief about the way that we link global health and vaccine equity. So I stepped into this role at the top of the pandemic. What we needed was to be safe. So, UPS had the benefit of being able to deliver vaccines in the U. S., but we wanted to make sure that other countries had the benefit of healthy opportunities to have vaccines, and to truly deliver what matters. So there’s a lot of remote and hard to reach communities, but safe with logistical challenges in delivering vaccines and cold change products. So we collaborated with non-profit partners like Care, UNICEF, a drone company called Zipline to deliver vaccines in hard to reach areas around the globe. As a result, UPS and the UPS Foundation have delivered more than 1.5 billion doses of COVID vaccines during the pandemic. Fifty million of those went to vulnerable areas with limited resources. We are really proud that after the pandemic has subsided, we’ve continued to deliver life-saving vaccines to children who don’t receive routine immunization services and are more likely to suffer from disease and illness.
John: How big is that, or how big is that universe of children who are in need of vaccines on a regular basis outside of COVID?
Nikki: Oh yeah, if you think about it everyday, think about in the U.S., we have the luxury of having doctors that tell us the schedule of vaccines. Your measles, your mumps, your rubella, all of this polio, all of these illnesses that we don’t even really have to think about because there’s a vaccine instantly told about it, and we instantly told about it. Not so much the case in other parts of the world. So we’ve deployed cold chain infrastructure for the Africa Last Mile healthcare equity program. We’ve delivered more than 175 million vaccines in 2023 alone.
John: Wow.
Nikki: So we are really super proud of that, and we don’t do this alone, John. I want to shout out some of our amazing [crosstalk]
John: Sure, please.
Nikki:… humanitarian relief partners because one of the things that we know is that collaboration, public private partnerships is incredibly important. So we work with organizations like Gavi and Zipline. We work with the World Food Program to help eradicate hunger. We work with the International Red Cross and UNHCR. These great organizations that are on the ground, helping to advance preparedness, helping to mobilize technology and solutions to save lives.
John: Nikki, where is all the information and success that you’re having, is that put together in a social impact report every year at UPS, or is it part of some larger program of reporting? How do you report on that, and where can people find that amazing information?
Nikki: So your listeners can find out about the UPS foundation on about.ups.com, and we put up a social impact and sustainability report, and we refresh our information on about.ups.com on a regular basis. So, this humanitarian relief information is just part of the health-focus area. We are also really proud that we have the largest private training of drivers to see the signs of human trafficking.
John: Wow.
Nikki: We know that human trafficking is an international scourge that hurts our communities. Our drivers are in the position to see something and say something. So we work with an organization called Truckers Against Trafficking. It’s based in Denver, Colorado, to train our drivers to be able to see the signs, call the anti-human trafficking hotline, or make a call to 911 if they see a crime in progress. Unfortunately, transportation systems often act unwittingly as a facilitator for human trafficking. So as a large transportation company, we want to do our part and we’re training our drivers, our pilots, and joining with companies like Delta Airlines and with international brands like Marriott and IHG hotels, who are also training their workforce to see the signs of human trafficking so we can protect our communities.
John: I share, I’m now 62, about a year ago, I saw that movie that had come out called Sound of Freedom. I was literally in shock that I’ve lived 60 something years on this planet, and I never understood how massive and gross that this problem really was, and is. Talk a little bit [crosstalk]
Nikki: It is a big problem.
John: Yeah. When you talk about human trafficking, help me a little bit, are we talking about underage, under 18, or is it human trafficking at any age?
Nikki: So there’s a federal definition for human trafficking, and I don’t want to get in the wonky ways, but [crosstalk]
John: Yeah, I know.
Nikki: But anyone who is a minor that is transported or sold for sex, that is human trafficking, whether they have consented to it or not, because minors cannot legally consent to being sold for sex. Okay?
John: Got it.
Nikki: Above the age of 18, there is a consent factor that the federal government looks at in terms of whether you’ve been forced, defrauded or coerced. If you have been forced, defrauded or coerced into sex trafficking, that is illegal. There are some states where you can, as an adult, decide that you want to be in the sex trade. We are talking about human trafficking where it is federally defined as being illegal because you’ve been forced, defrauded or coerced, or because you were minor. So we don’t want that type of illicit activity in the communities where we live and work. It breeds other areas of crime, frankly, that is destructive for the community. It is more money than guns and drugs combined, John. It is a massive criminal enterprise that we can shine a light on. We can protect our children, and help create safer communities just by creating more awareness.
John: Well, it’s just also taking advantage of some of the most innocent folks in our whole community, in any community in the world.
Nikki: It is, and it’s a massive problem. So I became aware of it through some work with government affairs. Some of our state attorneys general asked if UPS would lend its brand to helping to do awareness campaigns. We said, yes, and that’s been about eight years ago, and we’ve never looked back. I tell you, our employees cite our anti-human trafficking initiatives as some of the work that they’re the most proud of, because they’re moms and their dads. They want to keep their kids safe. They don’t want their kids groomed online. What we learned, John, is that human trafficking knows no socioeconomic boundary. It knows no race; no ethnicity. It does not discriminate. It’s something that we want to drive out of our community so that we can all be healthy and be safe.
John: First of all, this is so brilliant and so important. So your drivers, a good portion of your drivers are trained to spot this kind of activity and then report it.
Nikki: That’s right.
John: Is this North America, or is it beyond North America?
Nikki: So we’ve started in North America, but we recently this year, have extended into Mexico. You have to have the government infrastructure to support the recording. So the network of reporting systems works really well in the U.S. and we’re looking to expand it outside both in Canada and in Mexico because we want to make sure that we can alert law enforcement, that then law enforcement has the resources and the ability to come and do something about it. We also train our drivers. We don’t want them to hop out of cars and intervene, so to speak. We want them to be safe. They are not law enforcement.
John: Right.
Nikki: So we have training that is on video. We also have an organization called Truckers Against Trafficking that comes in with a mobile museum that actually trains drivers in their cities, and they can become captains and train the trainers. It’s really an amazing opportunity to get our drivers more involved, and to make sure that– look, they’re already the eyes and ears of the road. Okay?
John: Right.
Nikki: You said it before, that the drivers are trusted fabric of our community. So this is an extension of who they already are. They would save a dog. They would help a woman if they saw her in labor. They’ve now demonstrated that they’re willing to make a call if they see something.
John: What a wonderful way to put more eyes on our precious communities in North America to just make them better places for everybody there that is doing the right thing. I think that’s a tremendous thing. [crosstalk] I never heard about this ever. Never heard of it.
Nikki: Well, now you know.
John: Now I know. Now, our listeners and viewers know. This is great stuff. Hey, listen, when you were taking this job, you had to say, like we all do, going into anything new or preconceived notions of what’s going to be hard, and what you’re the most excited about. What’s gone to plan and what’s become much bigger challenges than you thought? Like, what didn’t go to plan and what went to plan, and how has been? Talk a little bit about things that you really didn’t expect, but you’re thrilled and excited about, and what are some of the biggest challenges that you face on a regular basis?
Nikki: Sure. Well, when I stepped into this role, it was at the top of the pandemic. What I did not expect is that I would have to lead through a global health crisis and the aftermath of George Floyd and some of the race incidents that have plagued our country. Then the war, and we’ve had humanitarian crisis, both humanitarian crisis in Turkey. We also have had earthquakes, and then now followed on by global wars that just continue to compound. So I feel like the world has not stopped just being at a point of polycrisis, John. I didn’t expect that, and I didn’t expect that there would be infinite resources, or I should say finite resources for infinite problems. So what we have to do is really focus. We can’t boil the ocean at UPS while you want to be everywhere and to be able to solve all of the problems. What we had to do is get granular around, how do we use our logistics capabilities to focus on the things that we do best? So that’s why we crafted the health framework; the health and humanitarian relief. We can move logistics. We can move medical supplies like vaccines in times of humanitarian crisis. We can use our drivers to help see things and spot human trafficking. From the equity and economic empowerment standpoint, we use our resources to help women scale their businesses because we know that there are lots of women who are in communities who are trying to be business owners. We know a little something about scaling businesses, and so we invest in businesses and help to make sure that those women are able to scale and to move their goods across borders. We work with partners to be able to do that. I didn’t expect that we would have a decline in volunteerism, frankly. Right now the world is seeing a decline in people who are wanting to volunteer. Part of that is because of COVID, and if you think about it, folks stayed in for two or three years. They were reluctant to go back out, and to really get into their communities. Volunteering is a core of what we do at UPS. It’s the ‘L’ in the health framework. So we have pledged to return 30 million volunteer hours to communities by 2030. We are at 28 million hours today, which is fantastic. We have already volunteered 800,000 hours in communities this year alone. We want people out helping one another, rolling up their sleeves and planting trees together. Creating food banks opportunities together. We give our UPS the menu opportunities where they can volunteer, and we support that because we know that we can make the world a better place and learn something about one another when you stay shoulder to shoulder in volunteering communities. So that’s really important to us.
John: I love it. If you’ve just joined us, we’ve got Nikki Clifton with us today. She’s the president of Social Impact at the UPS Foundation. To find Nikki and her colleagues and all the great work they’re doing in social impact, please go to www.ups.com. Nikki, that’s a brilliant point that you make. You can’t boil the ocean, but what you’ve done is you’ve stuck to your core business and leverage the strengths that you have. At the end of the day, as you say, you’re a logistics company. You have drivers, you move products around safely, intelligently, efficiently. So since you’re a logistics company, I did read that you have created a part of a logistics emergency team, which is comprised of what? Four of the largest logistics companies in the world. Talk a little bit about what’s the logistics emergency team? What are the other companies you’re working with, and what’s your greater mission there?
Nikki: Sure. So the logistics emergency team is a team that basically unites the capacity and the resources of the logistics industry. So if there are disasters and humanitarian relief needs, we come together and we as UPS, DP World, Merck, we really come together to create an opportunity to use our scale scope and reach to help in the wake of disasters. So we help with emergency preparedness. We help with disaster response, and with post crisis recovery. This is led by the logistics cluster of the UN and the World Food Program. So we are really proud of our first in kind partnership and our shared commitment to addressing these global challenges. So if there is a humanitarian crisis, we are called in and we ask ourselves, who within our network can move goods across borders? Who can use planes to get good where they need to be? We may ask Merck’s humanitarian crisis, we ask ourselves who within goods across borders, who get goods where they need may ask Merck to use their shipping containers to bring in large scale humanitarian relief supplies. UPS is a little bit nimble because we can get to borders using trucks. So we may do that or we may use drones to get to hard to reach areas. But each of these companies is committed to humanitarian relief. In this way, we’re not acting as competitors. We’re acting as collaborators to do good in the world, and to save lives. It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to join forces. We have supported more than 50 disasters in humanitarian crisis assisting with that emergency preparedness and disaster response.
John: As you said, and I fully agree with you, it seems like the externalities of the world, the infinite problems with the finite resources that we’re all facing has– let’s talk about two things that you mentioned, volunteerism going down post COVID. Is that because people feel overwhelmed? What’s your theory or science on why that has receded somewhat since COVID?
Nikki: I think it’s for two reasons. I think one, the places where people used to volunteer in COVID, they may have closed or they cut back on their resources. So if you think about in our communities, some of those local food banks didn’t reopen.
John: It’s true.
Nikki: Some of those food pantries or places where you might have gone to to volunteer, whether it’s an animal shelter or whether it was a church, they really struggled to rebound after COVID. So people got out of the habit of getting into their communities and standing shoulder to shoulder. They started doing more things online. They started having more conversations on Zoom. So they weren’t getting out because they didn’t necessarily feel safe. Now that the world has opened back again, people have to get used to adjusting their schedules and going back out to find places that they can volunteer. The other thing that happened, John, is that we started to experience some mental health crisis. We see that in our children. I’m a mom of four kids, between my husband and I, and I have two teenagers, then my husband has two. There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t talk about how to create a healthier mental atmosphere for our kids who are using social media quite a bit. They’re not getting out and running around and being in the community. Volunteerism is another way. It’s an antidote to some of those mental health crises because you start thinking about something that’s bigger than yourself.
John: That’s true.
Nikki: You start realizing that you are needed, that someone does value you. You’re able to really partner and be a neighbor. We find that that really is an awesome opportunity to just remind people that whether you are helping an elderly person go to the grocery store and bring their groceries in from the car, that’s volunteerism. It doesn’t have to be a big program. It’s that everyday act that is selfless, that you’re looking around and saying, “Does my neighbor’s yard need to be raked?” That’s volunteerism. Does my neighbor’s kids need to be tutored? That’s volunteerism. Do you want to be a Girl Scout leader? That’s volunteerism. Can I coach a little league organization?” So people can find ways to give back in their everyday day life, and at UPS, we encourage that. We also have a program called Dollars for Doers, where we give employees $250 in a bank where they can give to charities if they serve 50 hours in their community. So 50 hours gets you $250 that you can give back to your local charity, and that’s called Dollars for Doers.
John: What charities do they have to participate within their local communities? Are there guidelines?
Nikki: There are no guidelines. There are a couple of restrictions in terms of some of the things that best practices say you should keep to sort of these broad-based charities. But if you like pets, you can volunteer with the Humane Society. If you want to be a Girl Scout, go to Girl Scouts nation’s capital of Girl Scouts of America. So it’s a broad range of charities that people can volunteer with.
John: Is there good participation?
Nikki: Oh yeah. This year alone, we’ve had 800,000 hours served in our communities; 800,000, because we got to get to that 30 million, John.
John: Nice.
Nikki: We’ve got goals.
John: How big is the UPS Foundation they run?
Nikki: I have a team of 25 people. It actually is relatively small, but it is global. Most of my team sits in Atlanta, Georgia, but I have community relations managers that sit in our major geos, whether it’s Chicago, Illinois or Los Angeles, California, Canada. I’ve got someone that sits in Canada. Someone that sits in Germany. We’ve got folks in Brussels. We’ve got someone that sits in Mexico. So we literally are situated where we have large contingents of people and UPS employees that we need to understand the community and serve those communities.
John: Nikki, it’s a blessing to be in the job that you have, that you’ve earned, frankly speaking, but talk a little bit about, is the downside curse, is your inbox or you look like nuts, like people asking you for financing and funds and help? How does that look? How do you juggle that? Do that high wire of act and balancing act of figuring out what to support, what not to? Do you lay in bed at night thinking about those things? How do you manage all that?
Nikki: Well, let me tell you. That goes back to being focused, and I will say that we have no shortage of requests, for sure. As the word gets out about the good that we’re doing, we see more solicitations, and we typically do not take unsolicited requests. I have a wonderful team that goes out and looks for requests for proposals aligned to the health focus areas. So if there’s an area that we’re looking to go deeper in, let’s say anti-human trafficking. Last year we realized that we didn’t really have an organization that was focusing on migrants who were coming in and experiencing human trafficking. So we partnered with Tahirih Justice Center, which is a new partner for us that really looks at migrants and gives them the legal services that they need and provides wraparound services for migrants that are unfortunately trafficked. So the more we learn about a space, John, we’ll say, “We need a partner that can help us go deep there, and then the team goes out and figures that out. The other way that people learn about us is our employees volunteer. So as they volunteer they may flag an organization and we will look at doing a small grant. But we really try to stay focused because we want to be able to make systems change. We want to be able to really make a deep impact and see the needle move. That’s why we’ve targeted areas like humanitarian relief, anti-human trafficking, helping women scale their businesses because we know that we’re the experts in those areas.
John: I’ve commented to you before the show, how much I loved the artwork over what is your right shoulder, the UPS Foundation creating a more equitable and just world is beautiful, it’s impactful. What are you also so proud of that we haven’t covered today when it comes to creating a more equitable and just world that you’d like to share with our listeners and our viewers, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, we’ve covered a lot, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here to talk about the help-focused area. To talk about the work that we’re doing, to support more sustainable communities. What I’m really proud about is that in every community, you have UPS employees who are doing this work, whether part of our team formally, or whether just through the ethos of volunteering and giving back. Service really is in our DNA, John. The more that we talk and help UPSers understand what we’re doing, the more they’re going out in the community and spreading the news. I’m really proud to be part of a company that has 500,000 employees that are doing this work every day, just by extension of being UPSers, by volunteering in their community, by being those drivers that deliver goods while doing good. That’s really important for us.
John: I love it. A couple of years ago, it was actually during the pandemic, I’ve got to have Martin Luther King III on the show. I told him I held up the book that I read as a child about his father, and his father was one of my heroes. In our offices here over the front door is his great quote about service. “Everyone could be great because everyone can serve.”
Nikki: I love that quote.
John: It truly says it all. So to me, it also says about the great work that you’re doing. Nikki, talk a little bit about being Nikki Clifton though. You run a very large organization, that’s making tremendous impacts, obviously. But also you’re a mom, a wife, four children. It’s a lot to juggle. Talk a little bit about some of your rituals or routines that make you able to do your great work, but also be who you have to be at home, but also give yourself enough self-care so you could continue to be Nikki Clifton. Because it’s no good if you are doing all these important things with your children and your husband and the UPS foundation, but you’re wearing yourself down. How do you do that juggling act and keep yourself taking care of and moving forward and well?
Nikki: I love that question, and thank you so much for asking it, because wellness is something that we don’t talk about enough as executives. I think if COVID has taught us anything, it’s that life is so precious, and it can change on a dime.
John: True.
Nikki: Coming out of COVID and coming into this job, I made it a priority to really be intentional about leading well in terms of leading teams well, but also modeling that through personal practices and personal leadership. So John, I meditate every day. I use something called the Insight Timer, and it’s a free app. They didn’t pay me to say this, but I love the Insight Timer. I am one of those, I’m a recovering lawyer, so my mind is always busy. I used to think meditation was just like something I couldn’t do because I couldn’t sit still long enough to actually make it work. But I, over time, became really disciplined about learning how to meditate. I moved from two minutes to now 15 minutes a day, and sometimes a little longer than that, if I can make the space. It really does create an opportunity for me to power down and center myself and think about nothing.
John: Great.
Nikki: Think about nothing, and I find myself refreshed. I do it at the beginning of the morning, and sometimes if I’ve had a particularly hard day, I go to bed with a meditation because it quiets me, and it centers me. When you are running a foundation, you’re hit with so many– I talked about the poly crisis. It’s just everything, every storm, every shooting, every emergency, you feel like you want to run toward it and help solve it. So, you’ve got to find a way to regroup. I also live by my calendar, and my calendar is color-coded, so that I really can see what’s going on. My kids, even though they’re boys and girls, I have the pink highlight that tells me what’s going on with my kids. Blue is me for wellness, and brown, surprise, surprise, is a business meeting because of UPS Brown.
John: Right. It’s awesome.
Nikki: So I look at my calendar and I’ve got a great executive assistant Brooke, that keeps me on track. I’ve got a fabulous team that I can really say to them, “Listen, I need to pull back, and I need you guys to carry this load and to help me while I step back.” I mentioned that I lost both my parents. I lost my dad at the top of 2020, and I lost my mom this year. So it’s been a rough year having lost both of my heroes in the last five years.
John: Wow.
Nikki: So I had to really ask myself what matters most, and really take the time to spend with my kids to turn off my phone during dinner as best as I could. I don’t always hit the mark, but I try really hard not to bring the phone to the table at dinner. My son is a sophomore at Morehouse College, and so, seeing him off to college two years ago, the time really went fast. So, I try to talk to him as much as I can. Then my daughter, I use drive time to talk to her because teenagers don’t always want to share instantly. So sometimes you have to drive with them and let that silence bring out what’s going on. Then you just sit and listen, and you just try to find those nuggets of opportunity to spend. So my husband and I are really intentional about trying to build a family atmosphere that we want.
John: Comparing yourself, you and your husband, compared to your mom and dad, what’s the messaging? What do you want your children to be as professionals, as adults, or do you even know where they’re going, or have they shared with you which direction they’re headed?
Nikki: So, my parents were very achievement-oriented, John. Education meant everything to them. I mentioned they were first generation college students. They grew up at a time where being African-American and being educated meant the world of opportunity. They grew up in the civil rights movement, and so coming out of that, they were very achievement-oriented and very focused on having to be twice as good and making sure that I showed up well. Those things are very important for sure. We have not yet achieved in society everything that we would want in terms of a level playing field. So I’m very mindful of that with my kids. I still tell them there are ways they have to show up, but that character matters most. It’s not about chasing the dollar. That success is not determined by how much you make. It’s by the difference that you leave this world.
John: That’s true.
Nikki: That, I believe, to my core, and that is something that my husband and I both try to model either through giving back and through the work that we do in the community. I want my kids to be really good citizens first. I want them to be good people, and I want them to be happy. However they define happiness and I want them to be mentally well. I’m very worried about the mental health crisis for our kids, and I say our kids, I mean society.
John: Correct. Yeah.
Nikki: So I want our kids to understand that they have everything they need. That if they take care of their health and they nurture themselves and give back, the world will return goodness to them. I believe that.
John: I believe you’re right, and that’s a powerful and a great way to end today’s conversation. As you and I know, the work of philanthropy of impact, of sustainability, there’s no finish line. It’s a journey, and so the only request I make of you, Nikki, is since you’re on this fascinating journey in a very important spot with an iconic brand that people pay attention to, that in the future, I get to have you back on again, and you share the continued success and work that you’re continuing to achieve with your colleagues at the UPS Foundation. It’s been an absolute joy and a pleasure and I’ve learned a lot today as our listeners and viewers have about all the great and impactful work you’re doing at the UPS Foundation. Most of which I had no idea about, even though I love your brand and I’m a big user of your brand, and have been my whole life. So I just want to say, thanks again for this time. For our listeners and viewers to find Nikki and her colleagues and all the impact work, social impact work they’re doing at the UPS Foundation, please go to www.ups.com. More important than just your time today, Nikki, thank you for creating a more equitable and just world.
Nikki: John, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and thank you for the work you’re doing to lift goodness in the world. We need more Johns, just like you. Thank you for this platform. I really appreciate it.
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