ESPN honored the NBA with the League Humanitarian Leadership Award as part of their 2021 Sports Humanitarian Awards. The show is a follow-up to the annual awards that are announced at the ESPYs this past weekend.
The League Humanitarian Leadership Award recognizes a professional sports league’s programmatic and philanthropic investments and its work for strategically engaging with athletes, teams, and business partners to create a positive impact in communities.
The NBA was honored for its stories 2020, which involved the pause of a season due to coronavirus, its hands-on response to the racial reckoning of the United States, and the league’s leading role of serving, engaging, and inspiring communities across the world. The NBA Together initiative — launched 10 days after the shutdown — not only kept fans informed and connected to important resources but also generated more than $100 million for part-time arena staff, healthcare workers, and vital servers, provided over 10 million pieces of PPE and donated 9 million meals to food-insecure populations.
You can read the full achievement of the NBA and the rest of the humanitarian awards here.