For over 15 years, in partnership with the China Rural Development Foundation, Yum China’s One Yuan Donation Program has gone from strength to strength. Through it, the company contributes to poverty alleviation and rural revitalization by improving the diet and nutrition of children in remote areas and enhancing their access to digital education. Today, the One Yuan Donation Program is one of Yum China’s flagship initiatives and over the years it has grown into one of the largest and most impactful charity events in China. As of the end of 2022, the One Yuan Donation Program has seen over 140 million customers participate, covered 14 provinces and autonomous regions, accumulatively raised more than RMB 240 million, accumulatively offered more than 55 million nutritious meals to benefit rural children, and provided over 1,350 rural schools with modern kitchen equipment.

Under the program, Yum China brand restaurants, including KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, serve as the main contributors to this cause through in-store and online donations. Over the past 15 years, Yum China have continuously fine-tuned the program to increase its impact, including extending fundraising channels from its stores to its own online platforms such as KFC and Pizza Hut Super Apps. Under the program, Yum China has also rolled out new fundraising initiatives like charity auction livestreams led by its executives.

The One Yuan Donation Program expanded its mission in 2022 by adding a ‘Digital Classroom’ component to our existing program on nutrition supplement and modern kitchen. This new focus emphasizes on talent development, intending to promote the healthy growth of rural young children and contribute to rural revitalization.

Commenting on the milestone anniversary, Yum China’s Chief Public Affairs Office, Alice Wang, recently said, “For the past 15 years, we have been dedicated to promoting public welfare through various innovative means. From offering nutritious meals to providing modern kitchens, and to digital classrooms, from in-store donations to creating online donation channels including online charity shops, we stay ahead of the times while embracing love and generosity. Our aim is to make a lasting impact and raise awareness about the importance of public welfare in society.”

To learn more about Yum China’s ESG efforts, visit: http://www.yumchina.com/respIndex

BROOKLYN, N.Y. /3BL Media/ – National Grid announced Brooklyn-based non-profit organization, The Brave House, has emerged as the winner of the company’s inaugural Project C Youth Spaces Competition, after an extensive review process and a community-driven voting period.

The Brave House has been awarded a $25,000 grant to upgrade a physical space designated for providing programs and services to local youth. The Brave House provides support for young immigrant women and gender-expansive youth, ages 16-24, in New York City. They provide free legal support, community space, and holistic services, including mentorship, leadership training, in-house English school, one-on-one advocacy, wellness events, job and school assistance, support for new and expecting moms.

Expressing her excitement about the outcome, Renee McClure, National Grid’s Director for Community and Customer Engagement, emphasized the significance of the competition and its impact for youth across New York communities. McClure stated, “This competition provides a community-inclusive approach to focus on and support the fantastic work of providing programs and services for youth in our neighborhoods and communities.”

National Grid’s Project C mission is to inspire positive change, create positive neighborhood impact, strengthen communities and make a difference for years to come. The Youth Spaces competition focused on initiatives that contribute to social and racial justice.

As part of National Grid’s ongoing Project C community commitment, the company launched the Youth Spaces Competition for Brooklyn-based non-profit organizations to submit applications and short videos on their plans to upgrade a physical space designated to providing programs and services for local youth. The local community voted on a winner to receive a $25,000 grant to make the desired improvements and five runners up to each receive $5,000 grants.

The five runner-up organizations, 500 Men Making a Difference, City Growers, Inc., Genspace, Sports Oriented Nurturing Youth Partnership, Inc., and The Alex House Project.

National Grid remains steadfast in its commitment to creating and supporting initiatives that improve the lives of the people and communities it serves. The Youth Spaces Competition is just one of the many ways in which the company is achieving this goal through Project C.

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 
Alexander Starr 
(718) 986-0962

Karen Young 
(929) 324-4809

Comcast released its 2023 Impact Report, which highlights stories of impact and data from its many initiatives to advance digital equity, champion diversity and inclusion, and foster a cleaner environment. 

The company entered the year with great momentum, energized to continue its mission. They have now fully allocated their multi-year $100 million pledge to social justice and equality, and will continue this important initiative through Project UP, a $1 billion plan to connect people to the Internet, invest in access to digital skills, and strengthen pathways to economic mobility.

The report highlights the progress they’ve made companywide in 2022 and early 2023, including:

Surpassing their goal of opening over 1,250 Lift Zones to provide free Wi-Fi access at community centers nationwide.Awarding more than $11 million to 225+ organizations to raise awareness of the Affordable Connectivity Program and train Digital Navigators, community-based individuals who help people navigate the digital world.Supporting 13,000 underrepresented small businesses hardest hit by the pandemic through Comcast RISE.Partnering with 45 higher education institutions to offer journalism training for the next generation of diverse creators through NBCU Academy.Continuing to make progress toward their carbon neutral goal, reducing emissions 38% since 2019.Launching Team UP, their expanded year-round employee engagement program, in which more than 8,600 Comcast employees have supported 5,800 nonprofit organizations through volunteer service and their Matching Gift Program.

Comcast is grateful for its passionate employees and partners and looks forward to continued collaboration to help build a future of unlimited possibilities. 

Check out Comcast’s 2023 Impact Report.

Originally published on Illumina News Center

In her role as a genetic counselor and associate director of Medical Affairs at Illumina, Holly Snyder routinely meets with health care providers and medical societies to better understand knowledge gaps and needs for education. Her team is focused on developing accurate and relevant tools to support continued education in genomics.

“We do know that the general medical school programs have well-established course requirements and that adding in intensive genomics training isn’t currently feasible,” says Snyder. A systematic evidence review in 2020 found that, despite overall positive views of genomic medicine, nurses and physicians report overall low knowledge of genetics and limited confidence in managing and interpreting results relevant to their area of practice. A retrospective study from one medical school program in the US surveyed physicians in multiple specialties. Overall, respondents reported relatively low comfort with applying medical genomics in their clinical practice and they support the expansion of genomics training to include an emphasis on clinical utility.

Dr. Donald L. Gilbert works in pediatric neurology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. “In my subspecialty, several published surveys show doctors in practice as well as doctors in residency specifically desire more training in genetics,” he says, explaining that implementing genomics in practices like his is incredibly complex. When the neurology team sees an undiagnosed patient with a probable monogenic disease, they know they need better tools and guidance. “Should I start with a panel? Which one? Is it better to go early to whole-exome or whole-genome sequencing? What if one or both biological parents are not available?”

Receiving test results doesn’t always answer their questions—it can actually produce more ambiguity. “What’s the next step with variants of unknown significance?” Gilbert says. “How accurate are the predictions of pathogenicity in the reports by the commercial labs? Ultimately, how can we shorten the diagnostic process for our patients and get to answers sooner? And, as busy doctors, how can work be streamlined for us as well?”

Across the globe, there is a growing awareness that medical schools haven’t increased genomics education in proportion with the advances in next-generation sequencing technology, and this gap may delay our potential to realize precision and personalized medicine.

“Doctors in practice and in residency specifically desire more training in genetics.”

– Dr. Donald L. Gilbert, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

There’s an app for that
In March 2022, Snyder and her Medical Affairs colleague Maria Martinez-Fresno began talking to Xpeer, a Spanish company that developed an educational app they describe as “the Netflix of medical education.” The Xpeer app gives health care providers access to microlearning courses on a variety of topics, some of which are accredited by the European Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, while others are not.

At the same time, the Illumina Medical Affairs team had been working with neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) providers to support the implementation of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) for newborns with suspected genetic disorders—particularly Israel’s National Program to Accelerate Diagnoses of Critically Ill Newborns, which included 18 hospitals across the country. In speaking with various pediatricians and neonatologists, the team heard firsthand that health care providers in the NICU may have limited knowledge and comfort with implementing WGS into patient care. “Health care providers go to conferences and pick up a little bit of genetics here and there, but they may not have access to relevant genetics training to understand when testing is appropriate or how to navigate a test report,” says Snyder. They need training and resources in multiple forms, including point-of-care tools.

An entire canon of informative videos already existed—Illumina regularly hosts webinars with key opinion leaders on salient topics in genetic disease testing—but they weren’t collected in a single place. So Snyder and Martinez-Fresno set about writing a curriculum, cataloging existing content, and developing and recording original material, either in-house or alongside medical experts.

Illumina’s channel on the Xpeer app is called Genomics in Medicine. In the module “Tools to support genomic sequencing in pediatric care,” a variety of brief videos and supporting resources are available to help professionals effectively implement genomic sequencing into their practice.

The material is completely agnostic of Illumina technology, Snyder explains. It addresses many questions—for example, why is WGS important? What does the evidence tell us? What do you need to focus on when reading a report? What resources are available to support providers? What are the key guidelines that discuss WGS across the globe? Users can skip around and choose the content that is most interesting and relevant to them.

The module faculty includes Illumina experts as well as genomics leaders such as Anna Lindstrand, MD, PhD, head of the Clinical Genetics diagnostic laboratory at Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital; David Bick, MD, principal clinician for the Newborn Genomes Programme at Genomics England; Daphna Marom, MD, deputy director and head of the Pediatric Genetics Clinic at the Genetics Institute and Genomic Center at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center; and Monica Wojcik, MD, attending physician in both the divisions of Newborn Medicine and Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital.

The app launched this spring, featuring subtitles and voiceovers in Portuguese, Spanish, German, and French. Illumina’s channel, while not accredited, covers genomics in pediatric care. Future topics may include genomics in cardiology and oncology.

Other resources in a rapidly evolving field
As a leader in genomics, Illumina supports unbiased and accurate genomics education in the rapidly evolving field.

Beyond Xpeer, the Medical Affairs team has developed genomics resources for other clinical areas. The ObGProject provides helpful resources that women’s health and primary care professionals can check from their phone. Its sister company, ObGConnect, just launched a “Curbside Consult” guide to routine noninvasive prenatal testing. In cardiology, the Cardio Nerds podcast was created by specialists from several different institutions and features a series of episodes on cardiovascular genomics. A podcast series available on YouTube provides education around somatic testing in oncology.

Finally, other efforts across the US are focused on developing genomics education for health care providers: The Inter-Society Coordinating Committee for Practitioner Education in Genomics (ISCC-PEG) was formed 10 years ago with the aim to improve health care providers’ genomic literacy and enhance the effective practice of clinical genomic medicine. Along with ISCC-PEG, the National Human Genome Research Institute will host an education week in June 2023 to bring awareness to available resources for health care providers.

Honeywell’s chief sustainability officer, Evan Van Hook, and Shelly Kramer, Futurum Research’s principal analyst, join host Mandi McReynolds to discuss the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), a quarterly comparison of sentiment and progress on ESG initiatives, and the role technology will play in their success.

Listen Now

Looking for more? Subscribe to the ESG Talk podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube.

KeyBank is proud to join communities across the country in recognizing Juneteenth this weekend. For KeyBank teammates, Juneteenth is an opportunity to celebrate African American freedom and achievement, while encouraging continuous and honest self-reflection, and self-development in homes, workplaces, and communities.

KeyBank branches and offices will be closed on Monday, June 19 in observance of the Juneteenth federal holiday. 

“Juneteenth represents an opportunity to honor the contributions of the Black community and reflect on our opportunities to create meaningful, sustainable progress toward diversity, equity, and inclusion inside and outside our company,” said Chris Gorman, KeyCorp Chairman and CEO. “We remain steadfast in our commitment to advancing equity and access for all… in our business and in the communities we proudly serve.”

In observance and celebration of Juneteenth, the African-Heritage Key Business Networking Group through the KeyBank Foundation will donate $10,000 to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center located in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rooted in the stories of the Underground Railroad, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a museum and an education center, presenting permanent and special exhibits that inspire, public programming that provoke dialogue and action, and sharing educational resource.

Additionally, KeyBank will support a number of events and celebrations this weekend across its markets. This includes:

Cleveland | MetroHealth Cleveland Juneteenth Freedom Fest

Buffalo, NY | African American Heritage | Buffalo Juneteenth 

Columbus, OH | Juneteenth on the Ave – Juneteenth 614

Lewiston, ME | Juneteenth: A Change We’re Waiting For — Maine Inside Out

Watertown, NY | The 10th Annual Watertown Juneteenth!

Syracuse, NY | Syracuse Juneteenth

Albany, NY | African Heritage Parade | Capital District YMCA

Read more about how KeyBank’s award-winning culture that champions diversity, equity, and inclusion in the 2021 Environmental, Social, and Governance Report.

O-I Glass releases 2023 Sustainability Report documenting Company’s transformative pathReport shares current benefits of climate-change strategy and roadmap for low-carbon futureWith more than 100,000 tons of glass recycled through more than 50 customer closed-loop programs, recycling is among key drivers in 2023 Report

PERRYSBURG, Ohio, June 16, 2023 /3BL Media/ – O-I Glass, Inc. (“O-I Glass” or “O-I”) announced today that it has published its 2023 Sustainability Report. The content illustrates O-I’s continued advancement toward its ambitious sustainability goals.

The report charts significant progress in the Company’s focus on building strong glass recycling ecosystems around the communities where it operates. O-I has made targeted investments to establish scalable glass recycling solutions while improving the environmental impact of glass packaging and promoting circularity. 

By the end of 2022, about 25 collection sites were established through Glass4Good™ programs, generating nearly $20,000 in donations to the United Way. O-I has created more than 50 closed-loop glass recycling programs with global customers that have retained more than 100,000 tons of glass in the circular economy. O-I has achieved access to glass recycling in 96 percent of the communities where it operates, inching closer to its goal of 100 percent. 

“Sustainability requires collaboration and a shared vision across the value chain,” said Randy Burns, Chief Sustainability and Corporate Affairs Officer for O-I. “While we believe glass packaging is already the most sustainable choice, sustainability is about more than what we make. It is about how we make it.”

In pursuit of its vision to be the most innovative, sustainable, and chosen supplier of brand building packaging solutions, the company’s climate strategy leverages sourcing renewable energy, increasing recycled content, becoming more energy efficient, and leveraging new furnace technologies. The combination of these levers has resulted in a nearly 18 percent reduction in scope 1 & 2 emissions from the 2017 base year and a 5 percent decline since 2021.

“O-I continues to innovate and transform the glass packaging industry for a more sustainable future,” said Andres Lopez, CEO of O-I. “Our success in leading sustainable advancement for the industry has been the result of reimagining and reinventing the model for glass packaging while building a strong, resilient organization designed for the future.”

The 2023 Sustainability Report is available for download on the O-I website at: 
http://o-i.com/sustainability

###

ABOUT O-I    
At O-I Glass, Inc. (NYSE: OI), we love glass and we’re proud to be one of the leading producers of glass bottles and jars around the globe. Glass is not only beautiful, it’s also pure, healthy and completely recyclable, making it the most sustainable rigid packaging material. Headquartered in Perrysburg, Ohio (USA), O-I is the preferred partner for many of the world’s leading food and beverage brands. We innovate in line with customers’ needs to create iconic packaging that builds brands around the world. Led by our diverse team of approximately 24,000 people across 69 plants in 19 countries, O-I achieved revenues of $6.9 billion in 2022. Learn more about us: 
o-i.comFacebookTwitterInstagramLinkedIn

contact:
James Woods
PR Lead
James.Woods@o-i.com 
724-732-5748

Forward-Looking Statement

This press release contains “forward-looking” statements related to the Company within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended. Forward-looking statements reflect the Company’s current expectations and projections about future events, including regarding O-I’s sustainability vision, goals, plans and actions to be taken by the Company, at the time, and thus involve uncertainty and risk. The words “continue,” “believe,” “expect,” “will,” “plan,” and the negatives of these words and other similar expressions generally identify forward-looking statements.

It is possible that the Company’s future performance may differ from expectations due to a variety of factors including, but not limited to the following: (1) the general political, economic and competitive conditions in markets and countries where the Company has operations, including uncertainties related to economic and social conditions, disruptions in the supply chain, competitive pricing pressures, inflation or deflation, changes in tax rates and laws, war, civil disturbance or acts of terrorism, natural disasters, and weather, (2) cost and availability of raw materials, labor, energy and transportation (including impacts related to the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine and disruptions in supply of raw materials caused by transportation delays), (3) competitive pressures, consumer preferences for alternative forms of packaging or consolidation among competitors and customers, (4) the Company’s ability to improve its glass melting technology, known as the MAGMA program, and implement it within the timeframe expected, (5) unanticipated operational disruptions, including higher capital spending, (6) unanticipated expenditures with respect to data privacy, environmental, safety and health laws, (7) risks related to recycling and recycled content laws and regulations, (8) risks related to climate-change and air emissions, including related laws or regulations and increased environmental, social and governance scrutiny and changing expectations from stakeholders and the other risk factors discussed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Forward-looking statements are not a guarantee of future performance and actual results, or developments may differ materially from expectations.

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