How Cummins employees strengthen communities while building careers

On a Monday afternoon in Seymour, Indiana, Community Diner is busy. Trays of hot food are ready to be packaged. Amy Kriz and other volunteers begin filling to-go containers, moving meals down the table and placing them into bags. Near the door, another volunteer greets people as they arrive and asks how many meals they need.

Amy is not there as part of her daily technical role in engineering. She is there because the need is personal to her.

Growing up, Amy remembers going to a food pantry with her family. She remembers a Thanksgiving basket arriving at their home and her mother receiving support when she needed professional clothing for job interviews.

Today, Amy has built a career at Cummins in applied mechanics. She also volunteers, helps connect employees with nonprofit organizations and serves as a community partner liaison for Community Diner as part of the company’s broader corporate responsibility work. Her story reflects what she has found at Cummins over the last 10 years: Employees can do both. They can grow in their careers and give back to their communities.

“I think it’s great that Cummins encourages its employees to get involved in the community,” Amy says.

Controls engineering is often described as the brain of the engine.

Amy joined Cummins in 2015 after meeting the company at a Hispanic engineering conference in Louisiana. The opportunity brought her from South Texas to Indiana, where she began working for Power Systems in Seymour.

In her technical role, she helps test and validate products customers depend on. Her team measures vibration, strain and fatigue on engine components, supporting new product validation and helping investigate issues that may occur in the field. Sometimes the work happens in a test cell, sometimes in the field and sometimes through rig testing in the lab.

“We do a lot of experimental-based testing,” she says.

The work requires precision and care, all in service of helping Cummins deliver reliable products for customers around the world. That same sense of care also became part of Amy’s experience outside her day-to-day role.

Through Cummins’ employee volunteer program, Every Employee Every Community, the company provides all employees with at least four hours of paid time off each year to volunteer in their communities. Amy says she has always exceeded that.

Her first step into community engagement came through the Day of Caring, an annual volunteer event in partnership with Jackson County United Way. Through the event, volunteers support local residents, parks and nonprofit organizations with projects such as landscaping, painting benches, fixing tables, improving outdoor spaces or helping with other needs in the community.

For Amy, it was the beginning of a much larger path.

Amy’s commitment to community engagement is rooted in her own experience. Growing up in Weslaco, Texas, Amy was raised by a single parent and saw early on how much support from nonprofit organizations and the community can mean during difficult seasons.

As a child, she did not always fully understand why her family needed that help, and at times, accepting support could feel uncomfortable. As an adult, she sees those moments differently. 

“Food is a necessity,” she says. “You need it.” For her, the need around food insecurity is hard to accept, especially in a world where food is often wasted.

That perspective, along with her memories, shapes the way she looks at community service now and the difference it can make. Community Diner has become one way for Amy to give back to those in her community whose experiences she can empathize with.

“Even though I’m grown now, have built a career and am doing well for myself, there are still people out there who are struggling,” she says. “And I know what that feels like.”

Community Diner in Seymour provides free meals every Monday to anyone in the community who needs them. Amy learned about the organization through her community engagement work at Cummins, but her path into that work started with a simple yes.

As Amy began her career at Cummins, she was asked if she could help put together a newsletter for the local community involvement team, or CIT. Amy agreed to try. That first opportunity led her to become part of the CIT communications team and later to lead the CIT for Seymour, helping connect other employees with opportunities to serve the community.

In that role, Amy helped turn employee interest into community action. She shared volunteer opportunities, connected employees with nonprofit partners and guided requests for Cummins community development grants that support nonprofits aligned with Cummins’ global priority areas of education, equity and the environment.

She also worked closely with the Jackson County United Way on the Day of Caring and later co-led the Southern Indiana United Way campaign, supporting events across different Cummins locations. Today, she remains involved and supports the Seymour CIT as a special events leader.

Through that work, Amy gained a broader view of the nonprofit network in Seymour. She saw how organizations often work together to meet different needs. For example, Community Diner provides meals on Mondays, while other organizations support food access on other days. For Amy, sharing that awareness is part of the impact. The more people know about local programs, the more likely they are to find help when they need it or volunteer when they can.

As community partner liaison for Community Diner, Amy helps recruit Cummins volunteers to package and distribute meals.

She understands that volunteering or leading a community activity can feel like an added responsibility. What people often discover, however, is that those experiences can become meaningful and rewarding faster than they anticipated.

Building connection through community engagement

At work, people may spend much of their day focused on projects, schedules and technical responsibilities. During volunteer events, Amy says, employees get to step outside that rhythm. They work side-by-side in a different environment, talk about life and learn about each other’s interests and experiences.

“There’s a lot of joy in it,” Amy says.

Having leadership support has been important, she says. Her leaders understand her passion for serving the community, and their encouragement helps her balance her technical responsibilities with leading volunteer efforts.

Cummins gives employees the opportunity to do both: build a career and be engaged in their communities.

“Having someone on a team who is passionate about the community inspires others to get involved,” she says.

That is part of the ripple effect Amy hopes to create. One person says yes to an opportunity and discovers a nonprofit making a difference. They invite others to join them, and soon an entire team shows up together. Over time, those individual actions grow into relationships, and those relationships become part of how a community supports itself.

For Amy, care is not only something people feel. It is something they do. Her advice is simple:

“Just give it a try,” she says. “There’s no harm in trying something for the first time.”

One meal, one volunteer shift, one new opportunity at a time.