Brittany Haley-Addison helps handle community relations for Covanta, while engaging in corporate social responsibility —which means she’s helping develop deeply-rooted relationships with the community. She believes in her mission so much, she was out recruiting others at a Career and Resources Fair at Stockton University in Galloway, N.J., last week when she spoke with Randy Fling of rolling out magazine.
Brittany Haley-Addison: Oh, hi, Happy Women’s History Month. So, with a corporation like Covanta, there is a lot of room for women in sustainability to really come in and make it your own. That’s you know, from a marketing aspect from a community relations aspect engineering, operations, analyzing like prices and things of that sort. There’s a lot of careers with STEM in a corporation like ours.
Randy Fling: Tell us about some of those careers.
BHA: Okay, so I think anything that has to do with sustainability is super important for our environment. And for the future and seeing women in roles like that. And the girls that are coming up behind us really aspire to be in a corporation like this.
How Covanta interacts with its communities
RF: So, your organization, in what ways do you interact with the community?
BHA: I interact with the community in various ways. I’m out getting children to show the brilliant minds of children, getting them to come out and actually engage with us and see what we do and see how they can do their part to make sure that the environment and playing outside and green spaces is what we had when I was growing up. And also like with math, and science and STEM and things of that sort being so big, I feel like they can really make their impact on the world and provide a solution maybe in the next 10, 15, 20 years that’s even better than anything that we’ve come out with.
This also means coordinating tours and stuff with college students and making sure that from a community aspect, if there’s something that our neighbors need that’s relatively close to any of our locations, we can actually be out there [providing] support. That’s cleanups, that’s offering scholarships, that’s going into the local senior centers and making sure that they feel supported with whatever they’re trying to do and they just need a little bit more help with hands on tasks like technology and things of that sort. We’re actually trying to be the very best corporate neighbor that we can and that’s one of the things that we do.
RF: Is it true that you also provide food for some of these areas?
BHA: Definitely, yeah, so we’ve also provided a drive thru food grocery store for some of the areas that don’t have resources, like in grocery stores, it’s like a food desert sometimes. So, we want to bring the food to them, instead of having them go out or go to a couple towns over, which may mean they have to catch the bus or take a train or even if it’s their car going far to get resources for food and things of that sort.
RF: So, Covanta’s making sure that it’s accessible, which in turn makes your efforts even more sustainable? So, this is sustainability in more than one way…
BHA: Definitely sustainable. Yeah, definitely. So, this is like our fresh fruits and vegetables, a dairy different sorts of like oat milk or almond milk, just different things that you know, sometimes are overlooked and in the community and that people might really need so just diversifying what they can actually buy at the at the grocery store. We’re actually providing it for them. And we’re really trying to sustain our community relationships, sustain the environment as a whole and sustain just relationships and everything that we do is very circular.
