Drax Participates In Parade To Celebrate ‘Pen Friends’

To celebrate the end of a successful first year of the “Pen Friends” program, Drax employees took part in a mobile parade where they decorated their cars and visited Morehouse and Delta Elementary Schools to meet the pupils they had been corresponding with. Volunteers also presented their Pen Friends with small gifts in congratulations for their hard work during the past school year.

Last year, Drax partnered with the United Way of Northeast Louisiana to introduce the Pen Friends program to elementary schools in Morehouse Parish as part of the company’s commitment to supporting education and skills development.

Drax Communications Officer Annmarie Sartor says, “It’s incredibly rewarding to know we are addressing and helping to improve the reading level of children in our Drax-Morehouse community. I hope we can expand the program next school year to help even more children with their reading and writing.”

The Pen Friends program is part of United Way’s “READ.LEARN.SUCCEED.” initiative which aims to improve children’s literacy skills and increase social mobility. The program was introduced this school year at Delta and Morehouse Elementary Schools and offers second and third grade students the opportunity to exchange letters with volunteers as a way to practice their reading and writing. Each month, participating students receive a letter and a packet filled with books, activities, and other educational tools to aid their learning.

The program was initially developed by United Way in 2013 to tackle the issue of children falling behind their expected reading grade level. Drax has extended the program to Morehouse Parish, as part of the company’s focus on improving education in local communities.

Drax Regional Controller Rob Whitten adds, “It was such a great opportunity to be a part of the Pen Friends program in Morehouse Parish. Being able to meet our pen friends at the school and see all the other children who took part was a fantastic experience. They were an impressive, polite and appreciative group and I hope they enjoyed the program as much as we did!”

Latest news

Global Wood Bio Trending Positive

Recent developments continue to underline the continued strong growth expected in global demand for industrial grade wood pellets, including: • In June 2019, the UK became the first major economy in the world to pass a law to bring GHG emissions to net zero by 2050,...

Enviva Continues To Build Markets

In addition to 2,000,000 metric tons per year of long-term off-take contracts with Japanese counterparties, Enviva has recently executed several agreements with Japanese counterparties totaling more than 1,000,000 MTPY of additional volumes, including: —A 15-year,...

Strangers Scope Out Enviva

Enviva issued a statement that on August 20, the day of a public hearing concerning its plant at Northampton (Garysburg, NC,) two individuals claiming to be Danish reporters followed a logging truck from a job site around Clayton, NC to Enviva’s Sampson facility, some...

Germany Saying Goodbye to Coal

Germany Saying Goodbye to Coal Germany will shut down all 84 of its coal-fired power plants over the next 19 years (as of 2038) to meet its international commitments in the fight against climate change, the government’s Commission on Growth, Structural Change and...

Enviva Completes Public Comment Process

Enviva Partners, the world’s largest producer of wood pellets, issued a statement thanking the North Carolina Dept. of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ) for their work to ensure that residents’ and other interested parties’ voices were heard during a month-long public...

Find Us On Social

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Wood Bioenergy News Online hits the inboxes of subscribers in the wood-to-energy sectors.

Subscribe/Renew

Wood Bioenergy is published and delivered worldwide 6 times per year. Free to qualified readers in the U.S. Subscribers outside the U.S. are asked to pay a small fee.

Advertise

Complete the online form so we can direct you to the appropriate Sales Representative.