Month: August 2025

Live date: Tuesday, August 19^th at 12pm CT

Register here!

Organizations have been managing legacy remediation liability around the world since the 1960s and have experienced a multitude of challenges to reduce or remove these financial liabilities from their organizations. The stories range from “these sites just never go away” to “why is there so much variability in the future cost estimate?” along with everyone’s favorite, “why does the estimated cost to close these sites keep going up with no end in sight?”

We face hard questions from business leadership, so it is important to:

• Use appropriate tools including regulatory, technical, stakeholder engagement, and business prowess
• Present solutions in a way that business leaders understand
• Present the business case and a liability exit strategy with clear endpoints

Understanding complex technical issues, managing “technically righteous” consultants, keeping regulators happy, and engaging with your operations and finance team can be a struggle. Most people live in a world of constant change orders, complex stakeholder engagement, and regulatory remediation programs that seem to go on forever. These liabilities are a burden to the balance sheet and finding the pathway to manage them to zero is a business-driven goal for your organizational stakeholders. That business driver can be used as a vehicle to close sites and quickly extinguish those legacy remediation liabilities.

Rest assured; you found the help you’ve been looking for. This webinar will teach you how to present strategies to your leadership in business terms that will help reduce or extinguish your legacy liability and keep you out of hot water with regulators, your finance group, and the C-suite.

Please join us on Tuesday, August 19th at 12pm CT. If you can’t attend live, registrants will receive on-demand access shortly after the event.

Wednesday July 16th, 2025, might have been a regular workday for Paramount employees, but for the interns, it was the company’s 7^th annual Paramount Intern Impact Day – a day focused on participating in Paramount’s tradition of giving back to the community and immersing Paramount summer interns into the company culture. The Paramount Social Impact team, in collaboration with the Paramount Emerging Talent team, supported 5 in-office, virtual and in-field volunteer events which interns could participate in. 

Across both coasts and virtually, there was something for everyone from sandwich races to gardening to mural paintings and supporting educational development through storytelling! Intern Impact Day recognizes the need to create impact. And thanks to the Social Impact and Emerging Talent teams at Paramount Global, it was a successful turnout. 

On the east coast, interns braved the New York heat and sun to serve Hudson River Park Friends, a non-profit dedicated to maintaining the park’s beauty. The interns got to work on an outdoor revitalization project in the Habitat Garden, collectively removing 1.5 cubic yards of mug wort and bindweed to be processed into nutrient-rich soil for use throughout the park. Logan Tridel, Product Analyst Intern, said, “I had such a great day. It was great to give back to the community, had a fun time helping the garden, learned a lot and worked hard!”

But that wasn’t all for New York as interns swarmed onto the 7th floor of Paramount HQ to compete in a sandwich race to combat hunger inequality in the city. Grassroots Grocery, a non-profit on a mission to improve how families access food in NYC, facilitated placing interns in teams to encourage a little friendly competition for a good cause. In just one hour, the race resulted in 2,200+ sun butter and jelly sandwiches made! The sandwiches were then picked up and delivered directly to community partners for distribution. 

Over in Los Angeles there were two equally meaningful events. With the help of Vibrant Emotional Health, a mental-health-focused organization for people from all walks of life, interns had the opportunity to say “Thank You” to healthcare and frontline relief workers through Stars of Hope. The 30+ wooden stars were hand-painted with images and words of encouragement and support. Some interns really rolled up their creative sleeves and delivered special designs like Patrick the Star!

A short distance away at LA Elementary, more interns also unearthed their creative side by beautifying the school’s campus with fresh mural paintings. Volunteers painted one large “under the sea” themed mural as well as touched up existing murals pieces where needed most. Kelsey McRae, Corporate Event Manager for LA Works, supported the facilitation of the event and added, “most schools lack the funding to retrofit, upgrade, improve, or maintain the grounds of campuses. This is why the work that the Paramount volunteers completed is so important. The students were given the space to be creative, be supported and valued so they can grow into the best version of themselves.”

Last but certainly not least, virtual interns were not left out of giving back! Story Pirates, a non-profit focused on providing educational resources to youth in need, led interns through a virtual reading session in recognition of the young authors involved in their literacy program. 30 stories were read, after which, Paramount interns wrote much needed letters of encouragement to the young authors.

Overall, more than 100 interns participate in Intern Impact Day highlighting how much this is always a collective effort across the cohort. Paramount looks forward to continuing this tradition of providing interns with a front row seat to give back and create impact where needed.

At Trane Technologies, we foster an innovation-friendly environment, enabling employees to boldly challenge what’s possible for a sustainable world. Meet Adam Stroud, a Senior Battery Systems Engineer whose passion for high-voltage batteries is driving new electrification pathways to sustainably deliver essential goods like food and medicine around the world.

The opportunity to do innovative work on high voltage battery systems in a sustainability-focused job drew Adam to Trane Technologies. He works in the Center for Excellence in Electrification for our brand, Thermo King®. Thermo King is a global leader in sustainable transport temperature control for various applications like trailers, truck bodies, buses and more.

“High voltage battery systems are the future of our grid, and I wanted to be involved in that,” said Adam who designs battery packs and systems to help drive electrification of Thermo King’s transport refrigeration units. “I look at battery technology in the rapidly changing industry and fit it into applications to help the business develop road maps to be ready to use it,” he said.

Adam’s innovative spirit is evident in his daily work. He currently serves as the technical lead on a temperature-controlled battery testing facility, housed in a 48-foot trailer. “We have a large chamber that we can make very hot or very cold to simulate conditions on the road,” he said.

The team is also putting the test chamber’s battery power to work in the headquarters building. “We have a battery cycler that takes power from the battery and puts it directly back on our facility grid to power the lights in the building,” he said. “It’s a small way to increase sustainability.”

Bringing innovations to life: Adam’s patent success

“In my two years at Thermo King, I’ve been able to file five patents related to novel battery system implementation for transport refrigeration,” said Adam. He appreciates the company’s inclusive patent process. “You don’t have to know somebody or be in the right place at the right time in order for a patent idea to go somewhere,” said Adam.

“I think it is a very simple thing that we do here but very powerful, because it opens doors for anyone to submit their ideas,” he said. Principal Electrification Engineer, Matt Srnec, is a mentor of Adam’s and has encouraged him and others early in their careers to file for their own patents at the company. Learn more about Matt Srnec’s career that now spans over 12 years working for our Thermo King brand at Trane Technologies.

Why sustainability drives Adam’s passion

Making a difference is important to Adam who earned an engineering degree at Marquette University. During his sophomore year at school, he fell in love with work that makes a difference after meeting a professor who was researching how humanoid robotics can help people, such as children with autism. “He used robotics to make a difference, and I thought that was really cool,” said Adam.

Adam previously held two other roles, including one at a large company near Thermo King headquarters. “When I moved to Trane Technologies, the opportunity to make a sustainable impact was one of the key factors,” he said. “I left a job where I had a lot of tenure, a very good reputation and a promising future, because I wanted to make an impact by working on higher powered battery systems which have a bigger impact on our environment,” he said.

“I like using my engineering skills to work on a product that is deployed across the world to transport the frozen and fresh food that people need delivered,” he said. “Making the way we do that environmentally friendly is a way that I feel like I can have a big impact on the environment,” said Adam, who is an avid outdoorsman with a young family. “It’s kind of an emotional thing for me.”

Mentoring the next generation

Adam also sustains the engineering talent pipeline by mentoring the company’s interns and volunteering with the University of Minnesota Solar Car team. “The discipline of battery engineering is typically not available in college curriculums, so advising these curious and motivated solar car students is a great way to get them interested in electrification and battery engineering as a career,” said Adam.

Finding joy in everyday innovation

Adam enjoys going to work every day. “Being able to go in and innovate day-to-day is fun,” he said. “I try to come up with ideas that use proven technologies and methods in novel ways to address the unique challenges facing Thermo King customers,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s all about the customer and their needs,” said Adam. “I feel like every day, I’m working on things that are going to create a better future for our planet and for society in general.”

Adam Stroud’s journey at Trane Technologies is a testament to how innovation and electrification can bring joy in the pursuit of a sustainable future.

Explore careers that make an impact at Trane Technologies.

Learn more about how sustainability is embedded in our business strategy.

Our summer internship program provides a unique opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students to gain on-the-job experience in our businesses and to learn about PotlatchDeltic. Interns are provided with safety training and undertake meaningful projects and collaborate with other students, as well as with employees and managers. Internships not only develop a pipeline of potential future talent, but also provide our employees an opportunity to be mentors and build their leadership skills. Our 2024 summer interns included twelve timberland interns, five interns at our wood products facilities, and one corporate intern.

Timberlands interns worked on a variety of projects including seedling survival assessments, comparison of three-year-old growth in open pollinated vs. mass-controlled pollinated seedlings, integrating Cherrylane Seed Orchard’s parent tree with orchard block climate information into a spatial model to match our seed orchard seed to planting locations with like climates, delineating Stream-Side Management Zones on harvest areas, and field verification of seedling identification and mapping utilizing high-resolution imagery.

Wood products interns worked with the environmental department on key projects, including environmental compliance sampling and inspections, and a stormwater project. Mill interns assisted millwrights with work orders and on reliability initiatives. Wood products IT interns provided end user support and training, installed personal computers and other equipment, and built workstations.

The corporate intern focused on timberlands geographic information system data quality control through fine tuning topology, realigning roads to centerlines with consistent classifications, defining boundary maps, and digitizing road stands.

Originally published on Common Impact

By Silvia Chilel Martin

When you’re in the business of building brighter futures like Partners for Better Housing (PBH) you don’t always have time to stop and measure how far you’ve come. That’s where skills-based volunteering comes in. PBH teamed up with Nielsen volunteers through Common Impact skills-based volunteering programming to tackle a common and critical challenge: proving the power of their work. Specifically, they needed help analyzing assessment data from their Freddie Mac Credit Smart (FMCS) workshops to see if participants were actually walking away more confident and informed about the homebuyer preparedness process. Spoiler alert: they were—but now PBH has the data to show it.

We spoke with PBH’s Chief Executive Officer, Tenisha Gist, about how this collaboration sharpened their evaluation tools, helped them tell a stronger story to funders, and reminded them they don’t have to do it all alone.

It was refreshing and energizing to have concrete next steps rather than continuing to navigate these challenges alone. 
– Tenisha Gist

Can you describe Partners for Better Housing’s mission and how it addresses the affordable housing challenge in Northwest Arkansas?

Our mission is to build partnerships that create housing and upward mobility opportunities for modest and moderate-income individuals. Tackling affordable housing can’t be done alone—it requires the collective strength of various stakeholders. Whether it’s a landlord, realtor, architect, or even a friendly neighbor, they all play a role in shaping the communities we live in. Our goal is to address housing affordability gaps through collaboration while educating and equipping people to thrive.

We’ve helped people achieve financial stability, explore steps toward owning a home, and even provided direct assistance for those ready to buy a home. We’ve been able to support individuals with down payment funds to help them cross the finish line to homeownership. Through our partnership with Habitat for Humanity, we offered discounted lots, making homeownership more attainable. We also work one-on-one with individuals outside of educational settings to help them navigate financial wellness. We help them learn habits such as budgeting, saving, and investing.

Can you speak more about the specific challenge you brought to the skills-based volunteers?

Our challenge was to improve the pre- and post-assessment questions for our FMCS workshops. We developed these internally, but didn’t know if they effectively measured the impact of our workshop series.

Through a collaboration with Common Impact and Nielsen volunteers participating in the company’s annual global day of service, Nielsen Global Impact Day, we strategically examined our engagement surveys to pinpoint workshop impact and participant learning. We needed help structuring our assessments in a way that captured both the data and stories that matter. Our goal was to create insights that would resonate with funders and stakeholders—driving increased funding, ongoing support, and the expansion of our operations to help more people.

Not everyone who is a workshop participant purchases a home, but that doesn’t mean the program isn’t valuable. We wanted to focus on measuring confidence and knowledge gained opposed to homeownership rates. The volunteers helped us refine our approach, ensuring we asked the right questions to gather meaningful data without overwhelming participants.

What was your experience collaborating with Common Impact and Nielsen volunteers, and what key takeaways or strategies did you gain from that collaboration?

Common Impact structured the engagement with a great flow. We kicked off with a discovery session to connect with the volunteers and share our challenge. Then, during the incubation tank, they developed solutions, which they presented in a final session where we could ask questions and clarify next steps, so we were ready to hit the ground running.

The volunteers helped us synthesize information we had been working with for a long time but hadn’t had the capacity to fully refine. Their insights were highly actionable, and the instant feedback we received during our collaborative sessions was invaluable. It was refreshing and energizing to have concrete next steps rather than continuing to navigate these challenges alone.

When you’re deep in the day-to-day, it helps to get fresh feedback and be asked questions to see the problem in a different light or from a different perspective. Sometimes, when creating assessments from scratch, you include a lot of questions with the mindset of gathering as much information as possible—but not all of it is useful. We learned to focus on asking the right questions in the right way, those that serve both us and the people we support.

From your point of view, why should nonprofits get involved in skills-based volunteering?

These partnerships help address the need for expertise while overcoming the challenge of limited funding that many organizations face. The eight hours we spent with a skilled and engaged team enhanced our time and capacity.

Beyond that, we gained new supporters—people who now understand our work and are invested in it. That kind of connection has a ripple effect. It reinforces the idea that we’re all working toward a shared goal of community improvement. We only have so much time, funding, and expertise in-house and partnerships like this remind us that we are better together. Now that we’re connected, we can stay connected, and that’s exciting.

Many organizations may not realize the benefits gained from working with skills-based volunteers until they explore external perspectives. Skills-based volunteering can be a game changer, especially for nonprofits looking to spend a short amount of time creating long-term impact.

About Nielsen’s Data for Good® Program 
Nielsen encourages skills-based volunteering through the company’s Data for Good® program. These projects and initiatives involve supporting nonprofit organizations with Nielsen data, solutions and talent to make a positive impact. Through Data for Good projects, Nielsen volunteers help nonprofits to identify and understand their audiences, improve messaging, analyze reach and impact, and much more.

About Common Impact
Common Impact is a nonprofit organization that fosters meaningful partnerships between purpose-driven Fortune 500 companies and leading nonprofits worldwide to propel social good. We create, develop, and lead customized skills-based volunteer programs—guiding the process each step of the way to ensure success and create lasting change.

Tapping into different voices, perspectives, and experiences helps businesses solve problems, reveals new opportunities to grow, and encourages contributions that better support people and communities. At Henkel North America, diversity is a path to progress, innovation, and impact. Our employees and partners are united by our purpose: Pioneers at heart for the good of generations. They collaborate to tackle challenges, find solutions and open new perspectives – allowing us to deliver products, services, and innovations that enrich and improve everyday life.

We invite you to “meet” our pioneers in our series, “Pioneers for Good.”

Introducing Becky

Becky Kristopeit, Director of Sustainability and Climate Impact at Henkel Adhesive Technologies, bridges education, sustainability, and recreation in her role at Henkel and as an advocate for community development. She channels her passions into initiatives that empower people to grow, connect, and lead. Her work shows how blending diverse interests can spark collaboration and foster thriving communities.

Bridging Connections Through Sustainability and STEM Education

According to Becky, solutions to many of the world’s challenges lie in empowering individuals through learning and interactive experiences. Building on her appetite for knowledge-sharing and sustainability, Becky began advocating for STEM education in local schools – with a focus on building relationships with the students and other parents.

My goal is to be the person that steps up and provides a space to bring people in and feel comfortable to ask questions. Me being here means other people have a place to come to for support. I might not have the answer, but I can help by being an advocate for them as they find the solution.

Becky Kristopeit, Director of Sustainability and Climate Impact at Henkel Adhesive Technologies

From teaching sustainability topics to volunteering at school events, Becky has inspired students and families to think critically and creatively – connecting individuals, sparking curiosity, and inspiring others to come together in the spirit of growth and collaboration. At her child’s school, she chaired a Science Night event for the past two years, which included providing opportunities for parents and students to share their STEM knowledge with others and personally running a mobile planetarium to showcase the history of astronomy, sparking wonder and curiosity among students. Education is a family affair too; at another school event, Becky’s daughter led a workshop on 3D printing for her fellow students.

Fostering Growth and Collaboration through Youth Sports

For Becky, community building extends beyond the classroom and into recreation. As the coach of her daughter’s soccer team and a former player herself, she sees youth sports as a powerful tool to strengthen bonds and cultivate resilience from an early age. To her, soccer teaches teamwork, adaptability, and collaboration—skills that translate on and off the field.

Soccer is not only a super accessible activity, but also a source of many life lessons. It provides a basis for learning, encouraging kids to practice critical thinking, self-advocacy, and resiliency in an engaging, safe environment. And I’ve personally watched them grow from it.

Becky Kristopeit, Director of Sustainability and Climate Impact at Henkel Adhesive Technologies

When Henkel announced its partnership with the U.S. Soccer Federation, Becky was excited about the company’s collaboration with an organization that aligned closely with Henkel values and her own. The opportunities ahead include creating community impact through expanded access to soccer, promoting teamwork among young players and the expansion of and awareness building around women’s sports. These efforts connect families and communities, helping them find common ground, grow together, and embrace working as a team.

Creating Space to be Yourself

Becky believes that enthusiasm is contagious; by following what drives her, Becky inspires others to do the same. Whether it’s championing sustainability in her role at Henkel, raising awareness around the value of STEM education in schools, or coaching youth soccer at local fields, Becky creates spaces where individuals can find and create community by being themselves, collaborating, and contributing to meaningful projects. Her approach focuses on authenticity—building trust and fostering inclusivity to create a sense of belonging.

It’s hard to be you, but progress starts when people feel brave enough to bring their ideas forward and invest in their shared goals.

Becky Kristopeit, Director of Sustainability and Climate Impact at Henkel Adhesive Technologies