(198c) Outreach at the Shepherd Chemical Company: Activities, Successes, and Motivations

The Shepherd Chemical Company is a 108-year-old specialty chemical manufacturer, based in Norwood, Ohio. Over the past ten years or so, Shepherd’s outreach efforts have grown to encompass K-12 students, and we’ve further improved our retention efforts for co-op students. We how have recurring outreach events with several local elementary and high schools, have been encouraging employees to participate in local science fairs as judges, and have involved our engineering co-op students in these outreach activities, thereby continuing these outreach traditions in the next generation. Remarkably, there has been no general company directive or push from management to perform this work. Each of these efforts are run independently of one another and were initiated simply because the interested party had the right connections and a desire to share their enthusiasm for chemistry and engineering. This presentation will go into more details about these efforts and share the successes and growth we’ve seen in both our outreach programs and the students.