Month: April 2023

WALTHAM, Mass. /3BL Media/ – As the world celebrates Earth Week, National Grid today broke ground on its first geothermal pilot in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the City of Lowell, and the local community.

The groundbreaking included a demonstration of the borehole drilling technology that will be used as a first step in studying the properties of the bedrock in the area and is a key milestone for the launch of National Grid’s geothermal pilot, which is a multi-year initiative to bring clean energy to customers in the Acre neighborhood in Lowell.

“It’s fitting that the theme of Earth Week 2023 is ‘Investing in our Planet,'” said Stephen Woerner, President of National Grid New England.

“It’s one we at National Grid take to heart since investing to meet our net zero goals is a critical part of delivering for our customers and communities and combating climate change.

Exploring geothermal technology is an important step as we all strive to reach NetZero by 2050.”

Information gathered from the boreholes will help National Grid design a networked geothermal energy system — which uses the thermal properties of subsurface rock to help heat and cool buildings more efficiently — that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by providing more efficient heating and cooling to a neighborhood adjacent to UMass Lowell’s South Campus, which is currently served by natural gas.

“UMass Lowell’s commitment to sustainability and fighting climate change spans across university operations, to community engagement, to more than $40 million in research in the last three years alone,” said UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen. “We’re proud to partner with National Grid and the City of Lowell on this important project.”

Heating homes and businesses currently represents more than a quarter of total carbon emissions. National Grid envisions a majority of buildings will be electrified by 2050, and significant energy efficiency will eliminate a full one-third of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. Geothermal energy is an important component of that plan because of its potential to harness the Earth’s energy to provide carbon-free geothermal heating and cooling.

“On behalf of the City of Lowell, we are so excited to be selected as the first community in National Grid territory to participate in this geothermal pilot,” said Lowell City Manager, Thomas A. Golden, Jr. “This pilot not only has significant potential to help address climate change, but it also does so by engaging with our invaluable community partners, like UMass Lowell. The City of Lowell is all in to help make this project beneficial and equitable for our residents, supportive of the Commonwealth’s emissions reduction goals, and worthy of emulation for more communities moving forward.”

This is the first site selected under National Grid’s Geothermal Pilot, which was approved in 2021 by the Department of Public Utilities.

As part of National Grid’s efforts to help the Commonwealth meet its net zero goals by 2050 and the company’s plan to do the same, the five-year geothermal demonstration program will evaluate the potential for networked geothermal energy systems that can be applied to other communities.

National Grid designed this networked geothermal pilot program to explore how geothermal networks can be used to eliminate leak-prone pipes from its existing gas network, assist with gas system constraints, reduce greenhouse gas emissions in environmental justice communities, and provide the benefits of clean energy to all customers, including those living in Gateway cities.

To learn more about the project, please visit the link here https://youtu.be/zdR-PmFbQbE

About National Grid

National Grid (NYSE: NGG) is an electricity, natural gas, and clean energy delivery company serving more than 20 million people through our networks in New York and Massachusetts. National Grid is focused on building a path to a more affordable, reliable clean energy future through our fossil-free vision. National Grid is transforming our electricity and natural gas networks with smarter, cleaner, and more resilient energy solutions to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For more information, please visit our website, follow us on Twitter, watch us on YouTube, like us on Facebook and find our photos on Instagram.

Media Contacts

Christine Milligan 
Massachusetts 
(781) 907-3980 
Email

NEW YORK, April 27, 2023 /3BL Media/ – The Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) has published new research which investigates the factors that deter employers from hiring people with criminal or arrest records – and provides a “roadmap” to drive the adoption of Second Chance Hiring (SCH) in the United States.

With U.S. employers struggling to fill nearly 10 million vacant positions, system-impacted individuals represent a vast, diverse, and underutilized talent pool. Furthermore, 85% of hiring managers say these employees perform the same as or better than those without criminal records. So why are employers reluctant to embrace SCH?

The new report, entitled Hiring Justice-Involved Talent: Practical Steps to Becoming Second Chance Employers, seeks to help answer this question, and provide guidelines and resources for businesses looking to begin hiring second chance individuals. Author Ashley Furst, Senior Program Manager for Employment Opportunities at RBIJ, who is herself justice-impacted, explains:

“Helping individuals gain access to post-incarceration employment is a common-sense strategy to drive inclusive economic growth. By working with businesses to help them access and support this critical workforce segment, we can make our economy stronger, our communities safer, and give individuals the opportunities they deserve.”

The report is drawn from dozens of conversations with companies across a wide range of sectors, including financial services, insurance, manufacturing, service providers, and restaurants, in addition to academics and nonprofits. It identifies three main reasons why businesses do not engage in SCH: prospective candidates may lack necessary skills (such as digital literacy); employers may be unable to identify justice-impacted candidates for open positions; and companies may struggle to adjust cumbersome internal processes or enact necessary policy changes. In response to these obstacles, the roadmap is lays out three central “pillars” to drive SCH:

Employer education on the business and human case for SCH, as well as the unique challenges faced by individuals returning to communities post-incarcerationIdentifying community-based organizations (CBOs) and reentry partners to help businesses develop successful SCH programs and support system-impacted hiresThe provision of workforce development and training opportunities for second chance employees to allow for upward career mobility

The research was supported by Arnold Ventures, a philanthropy dedicated to improving the lives of all Americans through evidence-based policy solutions that maximize opportunity and minimize injustice.

“Employers are engines of economic opportunity, and with support and encouragement they can be instrumental in helping build a fairer and more just society,” AV Vice President of Criminal Justice Juliene James says. “This report lays out practical steps that businesses can take to address the inequity created by our justice system while driving recovery post-pandemic.”

Furst also penned this blog, exploring the drivers for the roadmap’s creation and her own experiences with employment post-incarceration. RBIJ looks forward to building out this vital work as it works with employers across the country to break down workforce barriers for system-impacted individuals, and drive the adoption of Second Chance employment practices.

Media Contact:

Ben Cumming, Chief Communications Officer, Responsible Business Initiative for Justice 
ben@rbij.org 
+44 7891 551 514 / +1 213 370 0222

About the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice

The Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) is an international non-profit organization that educates and engages companies to fix broken justice systems, and create meaningful opportunities for those impacted by them. They and equip businesses — and their leaders — to participate in meaningful advocacy, support reform campaigns, and adopt practices that create opportunities and increase equity for justice-impacted individuals. For more information, please visit www.responsiblebusinessinitative.org.

About Arnold Ventures

Arnold Ventures is a philanthropy dedicated to tackling some of the most pressing problems in the United States. Driven by a mission to maximize opportunity and minimize injustice, it invests in sustainable change, building it from the ground up based on research, deep thinking, and a strong foundation of evidence. Arnold Ventures is headquartered in Houston, with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City. For more information about Arnold Ventures, visit www.arnold​ven​tures​.org.

Originally published on Essity.com

Our greatest contribution

In pace with world population growth and rise in average life expectancy, there is increased need and demand for more preventive and easily accessible hygiene and health solutions. Driving awareness around and improvements to these issues is equally needed. Our products and services both save and improve lives by preventing the spread of bacteria, viruses, infections and diseases, and increase well-being and quality of life worldwide.

As Essity reaches many people around the world, it is important for us to recognize, understand and serve the diverse needs of our customers and consumers in multiple markets, while simultaneously creating a culture among our employees with a strong sense of belonging and engagement. We are building a workplace that attracts talent motivated by a clear purpose and vision for social change.

Essity conducts business in a responsible way and contributes to sustainable and inclusive societies in the communities where we operate. Furthermore, we are determined to offer the highest product and workplace safety standards to provide easily accessible, transparent product information to our customers and consumers.

Hygiene and health

Essity’s core business is directly linked to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 Good health and well-being, SDG 6 Clean water and sanitation, and SDG 12 Responsible consumption and production.

Every day, millions of people refrain from going to work or school or taking part in social events because of hygiene and health-related concerns. With Essity’s expertise and solutions, we work to spread knowledge, create awareness and empower people to address hygiene barriers. We play an important role in improving well-being in areas where gender, generational divides and variable abilities may constitute barriers to living a full and active life.

Essity initiates global dialogue and raises awareness around unspoken issues, perceived social stigma and the physical implications surrounding menstruation, incontinence, phlebology and personal and public hygiene. By challenging stigmas and providing access to products, Essity works to ensure that women and girls can continue to live an active life during menstruation and menopause. For example, our #bloodnormal campaign aims to call time on period taboos. Our TENA campaign #lastlonelymenopause aims to break barriers and the stigmas of menopause and encourage dialogue to increase the sense of inclusion and belonging.

Essity’s ambition is to develop the hygiene and health solutions of tomorrow. In parallel, we are working with solutions and models for preventive measures, health promotion and improved self-care, which is important in a world that is experiencing a population increase and strained healthcare budgets. To ensure the continued improvement of global health and well-being, we work with hand hygiene, cleaning, wound care, solutions for chronic conditions, caretaking of family members, incontinence management, menstruation and digital solutions. We also work with health promotion and enabling care systems and models for this. We are leading the industry toward a future where the well-being of both people and planet can be met by developing more sustainable products and services.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

At Essity, we create change together. Our employees are the core of the company. We are determined to ensure an inclusive work environment for all, to achieve gender balance in senior positions, and accelerate representation of under-represented groups.

Our Beliefs & Behavior form the foundation of our culture. Essity’s purpose is to improve people’s well-being by breaking barriers. Most of our brands explicitly contribute to greater inclusion in society by challenging gender or age-related stigmas. We strive to have diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) underpin what we do and how we do things.

Highlighting our efforts in the DEI area makes sense from a workplace and marketplace perspective. We know that DEI boosts innovation, improves decision making and increases employee engagement, which represent business-critical improvements for us.

Several programs and networks are offered at Essity to increase diversity in senior positions. Local activities are being carried out in various countries to target specific employee groups. Our employee survey shows that we are making good progress and provides valuable insights for our continued efforts.

Our approach to DEI includes a global strategy and roadmap, management team and workforce workshops, and the provision of inclusive leadership training to all managers. We have also included more DEI-related questions in our employee survey. In 2022, we partnered with Catalyst, a global non-profit organization that aims to create inclusive workplaces, which will enable us to accelerate our journey moving forward.

Read more about Essity’s strategic priorities, earnings and leading sustainability work in the Annual and Sustainability Report 2022, which can be downloaded at www.essity.com.

To access the digital short version, please click here.

The digital divide has narrowed significantly in recent years, but there’s still more work to be done. Approximately 37% of the world’s population remains entirely offline, while millions more don’t have access to a reliable internet connection. In this video, Don McGuire, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, and Kirti Gupta, Chief Economist and Vice President, Technology & Economic Strategy, discuss how 5G technology and innovations like 5G FWA (fixed wireless access) could hold the key to bridging the digital divide, giving more of the world’s population access to improved educational and economic opportunities.

In the developing world, mobile broadband has already played a crucial role in improving connectivity coverage and affordability, especially in countries where most people rely on mobile devices to access the internet. Now, 5G is paving the way to faster mobile broadband speeds and more reliable connections, and 5G FWA is primed to take that progress to the next level. 5G mmWave FWA offers ultra-low latency and multi-Gbps data rates, and can be utilized to deliver fast, reliable, and cost-efficient connectivity. Compared to fiber or fixed broadband, FWA builds on recent radio innovations that improve coverage, capacity, and speed. It’s also an economical alternative to aging DSL networks and costly fiber deployments in both urban and rural areas.

This discussion between Don McGuire and Kirti Gupta offers a firsthand look at how Qualcomm is leading the way in 5G technology and accelerating the global adoption of 5G FWA. We proudly support operators and OEMs worldwide as they work to solve critical challenges, including closing the digital divide with the roll-out of next-generation 5G networks. More than 40 OEMs are using Qualcomm 5G Fixed Wireless Access Platforms, with over 125 FWA designs announced or in development. In collaboration with our global partners, we’ll continue to strive to improve connectivity worldwide for the economic, educational, and societal benefit of the global population.

Learn more about how Qualcomm is expanding global 5G FWA

Download the 5G and the Digital Divide Report

Watch the Qualcomm 5G Summit FWA masterclass

Learn more about Qualcomm’s global 5G leadership

Originally published in GoDaddy’s 2022 Diversity and Pay Parity Annual Report.

By Monica Bailey
Chief People Officer, GoDaddy

If there’s one thing technology has taught us, it’s that change and innovation happen through a deliberate focus on iteration and improvement. The same can be said about culture and community. As I reflect on our journey to reduce unconscious bias in our people processes and continue to build and grow a diverse team that best represents our 21 million customers, I’d like to outline some approaches that have been successful at GoDaddy. My hope is that sharing these ideas with our broader community may lead to even greater gains across our industry and beyond.

First, we embrace learning from the experts. It’s exceedingly rare for a company to have in its ranks all the types of experts needed to be successful. That’s why it’s important to source different perspectives as often as possible. At GoDaddy, we leverage partnerships with external experts and organizations to learn more and improve the way we do things.

For instance, our flagship partnership with Stanford’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab (formerly known as the Clayman Institute for Gender Research) began in 2015. The Innovation Lab helped us realize that our well-intended people processes had not been intentionally designed to reduce unconscious bias. After learning that traditional performance evaluations often contain bias that holds women to a higher behavioral standard than men, we made changes to remove ambiguity from our behavioral criteria and published that criteria broadly to employees in hopes it would help all.

After conducting a series of internal focus groups and interviews, we refined the values in our performance review process criteria to amplify the themes of respect, authenticity and inclusion. As a result, all employees, regardless of their identity, are now assessed against a clear and inclusive set of criteria that limits variation and subjectivity in assessments. Of course, fairer performance reviews also lead to fairer opportunities for promotion and pay increases, which contributes to the pay parity results reflected in our 2022 Diversity and Pay Parity Annual Report.

Second, we continue to invest in the education and professional growth of our teams. This includes a special focus on our People Operations organization, which plays an essential role in how we create change. We must continue to make sure this important work in reducing unconscious bias is front and center for our functional People Operations teams and invest in training for them to understand the deeper concepts at play. This will enable these teams to support our people by prioritizing equity and inclusion across our processes, from recruitment and onboarding to performance management and career advancement.

Finally, we prioritize our culture while navigating challenging work. During a time when dialogue around fundamental human rights is intensifying, it’s necessary to continually examine our culture to assess whether what we have is what we aspire it to be. This includes asking ourselves, “How are we enabling people’s ability to have respectful, meaningful conversations about these crucial topics in our own workplace community?” To bring our whole, authentic selves to work, we must build an environment that does not assume we simply leave behind important parts of our thoughts, feelings and experiences when we log on or meet with colleagues. Like most companies, our customers are diverse, and all our employees play a vital role in supporting those diverse needs. This year, we will introduce a training series aimed at educating and talking about inclusive engagement and how to continually build and maintain an inclusive culture where we all belong.

Our approaches and goals require commitment, investment, planning and governance, which is why I’m happy to share we hired a dedicated leader of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB). Vice President of DIB Kristy Lilas has brought fresh perspectives to our programs and is helping us further integrate equitable best practices into how we work and guide conversations around inclusion and belonging. Kristy brings incredible depth and critical thinking, combined with formidable capabilities to build partnerships and make a difference. I’m proud to take on this important work with Kristy and our many collaborators and stakeholders. I can’t wait for next year, when we can share more about our progress on this important journey.

Please read our 2022 Diversity and Pay Parity Annual Report for more information.