Christmas morning just got a lot more exciting for 48 Summit County children. In two weeks, dozens of local kids will tear open gifts that were donated to them by staff at SDMyers as part of the company’s annual “Giving Tree” drive.

Staff purchased and wrapped gifts and left them under the Giving Tree throughout November and December. The gifts were then divided between two local youth advocacy organizations to be distributed to local children in need. The gifts were delivered by hand to both organizations.

“It’s great to bless children who might not otherwise have anything else to unwrap at Christmas,” said Mary Noel, Office Manager at SDMyers.

A portion of the gifts were delivered to the local chapter of the National Youth Advocate Program (NYAP), on Northwest Ave, in Tallmadge, Ohio. NYAP is youth advocacy non-profit organization that helps families across the Midwest, and 2018 is the third year that SDMyers has worked with the organization.

The remaining gifts were delivered to Dare to Share, an initiative of the Tallmadge United Methodist Church that helps children who experience food insecurity by distributing food bags each Friday to students throughout the Tallmadge school district. Many SDMyers staff make regular monetary donations to Dare to Share in addition to the Giving Tree drive, which goes towards the cost of filling weekend food bags for some 136 children in the area.

“It’s so important to give back when we are so blessed ourselves,” said Noel. “This is a wonderful way to give back.”

SDMyers continues to support Dare to Share throughout the year with monetary donations and plans to support both organizations again in 2019.

In the build-up to this year’s Thanksgiving, employees, contractors, families, and friends of SDMyers are getting creative and designing hand turkeys for a good cause—to help feed those in the greater Akron area who are struggling with hunger.

SDMyers has committed to donating $1 for every hand turkey created, photographed, and posted to social media with the hashtag #handturkeyforthehungry. The goal is to raise $1500 for a local charity that will feed Akron’s hungry this thanksgiving.

To kick off the campaign, SDMyers employees gathered together pens, glue, feathers, glitter, paper, and a whole host of art supplies and got to work.

This drive is still open, and everyone is encouraged to submit a hand turkey for the hungry. To get involved with the campaign, all you need to do is draw a hand turkey and post it to social media with the hashtag #handturkeyforthehungry and SDMyers will donate $1 to the cause.

Representatives from SDMyers recently attended the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) 26th Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida, to promote the message of “No Power, No Happy” and to lead a learning session on electric power reliability.

Over the past year, SDMyers has promoted the message of “No Power, No Happy,” a concept emphasizes the risk of unplanned downtime and massive capital expenditure involved when a transformer fails.

Alan Ross, Vice President of Reliability at SDMyers, presented the learning session, titled “The Art & Science of Electrical System Reliability,” on Tuesday, October 23. The session included discussion on the organizational skills required to make a difference at an organization and overcoming the challenges associated with the shift in diagnostic and analytical systems brought on by condition-based monitoring.

Also represented at the SDMyers booth was the Electric Power Reliability Summit, a three-day event for reliability leadership that is slated for September 2019. Craig Satow, Market Manager for SDMyers, said that there was a lot of interest in the event.

“This year’s SMRP conference was especially interesting because a lot of the professionals we spoke to are beginning to focus on their high-voltage electrical systems,” said Satow. “And that’s an important conversation to have.”

This year’s event saw more than 1,200 attendees and 100 exhibitors over the week, which included learning sessions from industry experts and a keynote from Captain Mark Kelly, commander of Space Shuttle Endeavour's final mission.

SMRP is a nonprofit professional society formed by practitioners to develop and promote excellence in maintenance, reliability and physical asset management while creating leaders in the profession.

On September 18, representatives from SDMyers attended the NorthCoast 99 event in Cleveland, Ohio to be recognized as one of Northeast Ohio’s 99 best workplaces—for the sixth time.

The 1920’s-themed event, which brought together professionals from nearly 1,000 businesses throughout the area, celebrated “Roaring Workplaces,” recognizing Ohio companies for their human resources practices.

Other award winners span 20 different industries and include Akron Children’s Hospital, Fifth Third Bank, and the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

The Electric Power Reliability Summit will return to Texas on September 17-19, 2019, hosted by the university’s Center for Electromechanics, and will feature expert speakers and practitioners from across the country.

In May of 2018, the Electric Power Reliability Summit (EPRS) brought industry leaders, reliability professionals, and experts from several areas of power system reliability together in Houston, Texas. In 2019, the community will relocate to the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center on the campus of the University of Austin.