EnergyAustralia grants boost local projects

BELLARINE community members have received grants from EnergyAustralia to help local projects become a reality.

Member for Geelong Christine Couzens, along with Lizzie Elliot, John Burdess and Judy Knight, took part in a special tour of EnergyAustralia’s award-winning Customer Care Centre and enjoyed a morning tea with staff last week to celebrate their successful grants.

EnergyAustralia community grants provide financial assistance to local projects addressing the important social issues within our communities in the areas of education and social inclusion, which can extend to the upgrade of facilities for small community groups.

This year’s successful community grant recipients for Geelong and the Western district were:
BARWON Heads Primary School who will use their grant to purchase and install an irrigation system for their edible garden, a key part of the grade two and three sustainability curriculum.

SPRINGDALE Community Garden who will purchase a new mulcher that will replace the existing manual process of converting their waste materials to compost, in turn making the community garden more productive.

LEOPOLD Toy Library and Warrnambool Toy Library who both received grants to purchase and distribute a collection of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) toys for pre-school families to foster an early interest and familiarity with STEM education.

Following the presentation of the community grants, Casey Kaminskyj, Leader – Customer Care Geelong, took the recipients on a tour of the call centre, which employs more than 350 locals.

The Customer Care staff are very active in raising funds for local charities as well – and have raised an impressive $70,000 in addition to the annual EnergyAustralia community grants program.