There’s a saying people use when someone is involved in several different roles. That person is said to wear many hats. When it comes to community involvement, we here at Granger wear several different and varied types of hats. From casual to fancy, we have them all covered. Read on to learn more about our community involvement hats.
Party hat—You know the type. It’s one of those brightly colored pointy paper hats with the string that goes around your chin. It’s the hat you wore at elementary school birthday parties. This hat is all about events—and so is Granger.
This week starts a very exciting time of the year at Granger—the season of Christmas parades. For the next four weeks, you’ll see lighted Granger trucks popping up in at least 10 parades in different areas around our service territory, including Silver Bells in the City and the Downtown Jackson Light Parade.
And of course, our resident party animal Captain CurbySM is heavily involved with our events. Each year, he makes appearances before Lansing Lugnuts games and attends community events like Williamston’s National Night Out Celebration.
Baseball cap—The baseball cap is a casual, down-to-earth type of hat. It says “I’m willing to pitch in and get my hands dirty.” This hat represents Granger’s volunteer aspect. We like to send Granger representatives out in the community to get involved in seriously hands-on ways. This year, a couple of our volunteer opportunities included Rural Urban Day and Challenge Day. Rural Urban Day is an opportunity for the rural and urban communities of Gratiot County to come together for a community picnic. For the past several years, volunteers from Granger have attended and been responsible for bussing the picnic tables and emptying the trash. (Pretty appropriate, huh?) We’ve also gotten to enjoy the fantastic food!
Granger associates participated in Challenge Day for the first time this year. Challenge Days are powerful, high-energy programs in which youth and adult participants are guided through a series of experiences to increase personal power and self-esteem, to shift dangerous peer pressure to positive peer support and to eliminate the acceptability of bullying and violence. Five Granger associates participated in Challenge Day in Jackson, along with other adult volunteers and seventh grade students from several Jackson area schools. It was an intense experience for us.
Mortar board—We know it’s a weird name and you might not know what we’re talking about, but you’d recognize if you saw it. It’s that graduation cap you throw in the air at the end of the ceremony, and at Granger it stands for education. We love to share ur knowledge with people in the communities we serve. That can mean a public open house at one of our energy facilities in Pennsylvania (or one of the other five states) where we educate our neighbors on how we collect tomorrow’s energy.
Sometimes it takes the form of a tour of Wood Street Landfill for the Michigan State University packaging class that visits us every year to learn how we build landfills to be safe places to put trash.
This year, we had the opportunity to send one of our engineers to a career fair at Lansing Christian School to open up middle schoolers’ minds to the possibility of working for a company like ours.
Request a tour or presentation.
Top hat—The top hat, fancy as it is, signifies the financial aspect of our community involvement. While Granger favors in-kind donations as part of our Corporate Giving Program, we also provide cash support to different events and causes.
Often our giving includes a free or discounted trash container or donated event boxes for trash and/or recycling. These gifts allow non-profit organizations to save on the expenses associated with their fundraisers, and they’re right up our alley.
In terms of cash sponsorships, we were excited to provide support for the inaugural Greater Lansing Balloon Festival. Proceeds from that event went to the Lansing Promise scholarship program for students in the Lansing community. We also sponsored the Childrenz Challenge in the Jackson area at Michigan International Speedway. This event benefits the school with the most student or teacher participants in the challenge. In the northern end of our service territory, we sponsored the St. Louis Farmers Market, which provides fresh produce to local residents from June to October. And just to come full circle to our parade reference at the beginning of this post, again this year we’re the Tree Lighting Sponsor at Silver Bells in the City, another outstanding event in the Lansing area.
Learn more about our Corporate Giving Program.
So there you have it—all our many hats when it comes to community involvement. Each of these hats serves a unique and important function in our communities and they’re one of our favorite parts about working for a company that lives by the Golden Rule.