Susan Harwood Training Grant Program Wins Project of the Year at IPS Awards

Congratulations to our Health, Safety and Emergency Preparedness team for winning the Faculty Excellence Award at the UT Institute for Public Service (UT IPS) Annual Conference. This team includes Chuck Gluck, Bryan Lane and Walter Idol. The team is pictured above with Dr. Herb Byrd III, Vice President for Public Service at the University of Tennessee.

To win Project of the Year, a team of employees at one of IPS's six agencies must be working on an ongoing project or have completed a project that supports the IPS Strategic Plan.

When there is a major hurricane, tornado weather event or flood an important part of a city or state's response and recovery is making sure that utility workers, heavy equipment operators, demolition, and even tree removers are trained about the hazards and hazardous materials they will face and how to stay safe.

This year, the Center for Industrial Services was awarded a highly competitive grant from OSHA's Susan Harwood Training Grant Program to provide safety training to workers and extend the IPS mandate of public service into the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

With this grant, the CIS safety team provided 4,400 training hours to 1,050 workers that are union and non-union workers, small businesses, emergency responders, small contractors, day laborers, temporary workers, limited-English proficiency, and non-English speaking workers.

This grant project helped IPS expand its public service brand into 4 other states and has helped federal OSHA build capacity to recover and respond from weather-related disasters in the South Atlantic region and Florida. 

Project selection for this award is based on contributions promoting advancements in service quality, relationship development, entrepreneurial use of technology, approaches that advance the efficiency of customer operations or IPS internal operations, leadership development, exemplary use of face-to-face contacts or development of new methodologies for advancing delivery of services, or advancement in the use of environmentally friendly technologies. Way to go, team!