MAN Truck & Bus employees support people in need in Ukraine

Enormous willingness to donate and diverse support across all MAN Truck & Bus sites and national companies: Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, employees of the commercial vehicle manufacturer have provided help for the people in need in very different ways. They collected relief supplies, organised transports, donated money and offered direct support for the refugees. Where possible, MAN provides vehicles to support aid organisations. A large number of trucks, buses and vans from the plants and sales companies are in action to transport relief supplies to the crisis region and bring refugees to safety.

“The willingness of our colleagues to help is enormous,” says Fabian Heidinger, who coordinates the relief efforts throughout the company. “And the will to support is unbroken. The fact that MAN employees are helping so energetically and imaginatively makes us proud and we are pleased when the help arrives.”

The willingness to support is particularly high at the sites and sales companies in the countries bordering on Ukraine. For example, in Poland, where MAN employees took care of the transport and accommodation of Ukrainian colleagues and their families who had fled their home country. They also brought urgently needed food and hygiene articles to the border.

For the numerous donations in kind from all countries and locations, MAN employees often work together with partner organisations. For example, the weekly aid transports from Slovakia, which MAN Austria has also joined, are brought to Ukraine and distributed via partners from the border region. Already the first transport brought 10,000 tins of food, plus medicines, sleeping bags and power generators.

The provision of vehicles is an essential aspect of the aid effort. MAN Truck & Bus France, for example, provided five trucks to the Civil Defence, which coordinates the donation activities in France, as well as semi-trailers from other MAN partner companies. This made it possible to transport many tonnes of relief supplies from France to the Polish-Ukrainian border. In Poland, MAN employees supported journalists in their work by providing them with a TGE transporter.

The fact that the cooperation between private initiative, MAN and partner organisations works was also demonstrated by the employees at the German sites: In Nuremberg and Munich, volunteers sorted and packed more than 1,800 donated packages on over 100 Euro pallets. So first two MAN trucks with 34 pallets from the MAN collection campaign set off for northern Romania. There is a logistics hub there run by the St John Ambulance, who, as a partner of MAN, take the aid supplies from there to Ukraine. The Salzgitter components plant provided a TGE transporter so that the numerous relief supplies could be driven to the border area.

MAN made a TGX and trailer available to the “Brucker help the Ukraine” initiative in Fürstenfeldbruck near Munich. Without further ado, two MAN colleagues volunteered to get behind the wheel and drive the truck, fully loaded with donated relief supplies, to Lublin in Poland. MAN Service Dortmund also collected urgently needed goods in cooperation with the association “Children need our help” (KIBU), and employees from the Hagen branch drove many tonnes of relief goods to Krakow on their own initiative and handed them over to the local Caritas organisation. In the North-East sales region, MAN companies supported the fundraising campaign of the Bode haulage company, which drove relief supplies to the Polish capital on 15 lorries. The South sales region collected around 500 first-aid kits from the German service companies, which were delivered to Ukraine as urgently needed first-aid material.

In addition to the various in-kind donation campaigns, MAN employees are also taking part in the “employee donation” called for by group management and co-determination in the Volkswagen Group. The donations go to UN Refugee Aid, the national partner of the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR. UNHCR is working closely with the authorities in Ukraine and neighbouring countries to organise emergency aid.

“The situation continues to be very dynamic, with requests coming in all the time. At MAN, we are coordinating our efforts so that we can approach the new activities in a targeted manner and resolve them in terms of comprehensive support,” says coordinator Fabian Heidinger.