Today is International Volunteer Day – a global day of opportunity launched by the United Nations to recognize and celebrate individual and collaborative acts of volunteerism that create meaningful change.

Every day, BD employees around the world are taking the initiative to come together to implement meaningful service projects. In honor of International Volunteer Day, we thank the thousands of employees that take the time to give back all year long – including those volunteers who have made two of the company’s signature volunteer programs – Volunteer Service Trips and BD Global Health Partnerships – possible.

• For more than a decade, BD has sent more than 250 Global Health Fellows, each with a deep expertise in laboratory systems and clinical practices such as phlebotomy, injections and infusions, to developing nations that have been severely impacted by HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. These volunteers have traveled to Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Haiti and India to work with the U.S. President’s Emergency Relief Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), local ministries of health and other in-country partners to provide training and technical support to strengthen laboratory systems in these developing nations. BD Global Health Fellows also provide technical training to health care workers to help improve the accuracy and expediency of laboratory systems and processes that play such an important role in diagnosing and treating a myriad of diseases. And in doing so, they’re strengthening health care systems and expanding access to lifesaving quality care among vulnerable populations.

  BD Global Health has built additional partnerships around the same model (leveraging the expertise of BD volunteers), including the Strengthening TB Resistance Testing and Diagnostic Systems (STRIDES) program, which is a collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to help tackle drug resistant TB infections.

• Every year, BD offers its employees the opportunity to serve alongside one of our nonprofit partners in a resource-poor region of the world. Through the BD Volunteer Service Trip program, employee volunteers travel for several weeks to lead meaningful service projects that help expand health care access to vulnerable populations. Since 2005, hundreds of employees from nearly 30 BD locations around the world have participated in the program, visiting countries such as Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, Ghana, Cameroon and Zambia.

International Volunteer Day provides us with an opportunity to thank the hundreds of BD volunteers that have participated in these two pillar programs, and most importantly, for the meaningful, long-term impact their service has had on the global communities where they’ve served.