‘Miles On A Mission’ Can Use Your Airline Miles to Make a Difference

As the devastating effects of COVID-19 now stretch into their second year, Project HOPE’s global response to support health care workers is not slowing down.

And thanks to United Airlines, there’s a new way you can support our mission: with your unused airline miles.

As part of United Airlines’ Miles on a Mission program, Project HOPE is seeking to raise 500,000 donated miles from United MileagePlus members to support our COVID-19 response in the U.S. and around the world. Last year, United members donated over 2 million miles that Project HOPE used to deploy medical volunteers to provide COVID-19 support in hard-hit locations across the United States, including Chicago, Houston, Maryland, and Navajo Nation.

“Donated United miles were an essential part of our response to the COVID pandemic last year,” says Harley Jones, Project HOPE’s Senior Manager of Domestic Emergency Response. “It gave us the resources to react quickly when public health departments, hospitals, and clinics became overwhelmed. Thanks to donated miles, we were able to send medical volunteers to these areas as soon as the need was apparent.”

Click here to donate your miles to Project HOPE >>

As health care workers around the U.S. have bravely stepped up to the challenge of COVID-19, Project HOPE’s volunteers have stood right alongside them: surge staffing ICUs, providing community testing, conducting contact tracing, and now administering vaccines in communities that need it most.

Our ability to deploy medical volunteers into health crises, natural disasters, and humanitarian emergencies is a crucial part of our mission to empower local health care workers around the world. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, when so many volunteers have been needed in so many places, that support has been made possible thanks in large part to United.

Miles on a Mission launched in October 2019 as an expansion of United’s previous Charity Miles program. The program enables MileagePlus members to donate their miles to causes close to their heart, whether big or small, says Nicole Lee, Director of Social Impact Optimization at United.

“It means the world to United to know that we are able to play a small role in making these meaningful connections between our MileagePlus members and nonprofits like Project HOPE,” she says. “Through this collaboration, our members and our planes contributed to Project HOPE’s mission to provide access to lifesaving health care. We know that our charity partners’ missions haven’t stopped, and neither has United.”

Project HOPE’s current Miles on a Mission campaign will be used to deploy frontline medical personnel to support our COVID-19 response in places like Navajo Nation, where Project HOPE volunteers have partnered with Indian Health Services to reach the hard-hit Navajo community throughout the pandemic.

“While we will focus on training and supporting our volunteer base, the new campaign will help us rebuild our bank of donated miles so that we can continue to support fragile health care systems and stand ready to deploy when disaster strikes,” Jones says.

“Partners like United are an essential part of our mission. We couldn’t support the health care needs and capacity of vulnerable populations without their support. United and Project HOPE are natural partners because of our mutual focus on bringing people together — and this partnership has never been more important. In order to emerge from the pandemic stronger, we must be prepared to address health care shortfalls and equity so that populations around the world are healthier than ever.”

Click here to donate your miles to Project HOPE >>