Business Excellence Awards 2018
Community involvement: National Grid Rhode Island
National Grid Rhode Island dives right in when it comes to community service – or at least wades in – as volunteers did recently with Save The Bay, to help the organization replace eelgrass. Many eelgrass beds have been lost due to pollution and other factors, and it’s a food source for marine life. So a National Grid team donned waders – and got involved.
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“We’re taking a boat from Charlestown beach and … working in Ninigret Pond,” said National Grid’s Marisa Albanese, manager of community and customer management, before the excursion.
Environmental projects – such as eelgrass restoration – and community service, education and safety are the four main areas National Grid commits to in the areas it serves.
“These are areas we feel are pretty key to our customers,” said Timothy F. Horan, president of National Grid Rhode Island.
Specific examples include the gas and electric company’s Lunch on Us program, through which it provides and serves lunch to the needy at McAuley House in Providence for the month of May; a City Year Rhode Island event at Gilbert Stuart Middle School to assemble teacher-appreciation packets; and promotion of the United Way 211 emergency line for storm preparedness.
These efforts are all part of the company’s Power To Serve program. Last year, 30 percent of National Grid’s 950 Rhode Island employees volunteered in the community.
It has a core group of agencies it serves in ways that often overlap, Horan and Albanese said. In addition to volunteer work, its leaders serve on the boards of numerous nonprofits, including Horan being on the board of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, for example.
And the ways the company gives back are varied and diverse, Albanese said.
“Sometimes employees give us ideas. … In our Lincoln office, they like to collect hats and mittens for kids.” Others like to buy other gifts for children’s charities, she said.
In other instances, the culture of community service and dedication spills over in less-structured ways. Albanese tells of the team at the National Grid Dexter Street location in Providence jumping in with a Bobcat one winter when someone there noticed the principal of the Alfred Lima Elementary School nearby, shoveling snow.
Albanese said National Grid has an advantage working in Rhode Island, a small state where connections seem to come easier. She said vetting the nonprofits National Grid supports is simple due to the company’s already high level of local involvement.
“We don’t ask for very formal reports,” she said. “Though we aren’t just writing a check. We’re involved in what they are doing.”
Often this results in lasting connections. In North Kingstown, for example, National Grid does volunteer work with Davisville Middle School. It was able to connect Davisville with a United Way grant program to help it continue some of its after-school programming over the summer, said Albanese.
Specifically, in the area of education, National Grid supports STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) efforts.
Last year, National Grid also put volunteer employees out there as mentors, joining with Big Brothers Big Sisters for the Beyond School Walls program. Fifteen students from Providence’s Lillian Feinstein Elementary School were matched up with employee mentors and did STEM-related activities with them for the first half of the year.
National Grid’s local involvement benefits the community, but it also benefits the company and its team members, Albanese said.
Company-sponsored projects often put those who are not in leadership roles in the company into leadership roles for these community efforts, she said. The National Grid locations in Rhode Island also help out at each other’s local projects when possible.
“It allows people from different parts of the state to meet,” she said. “It builds teamwork and camaraderie. It feels good to support these projects and our communities in general.”
