By Dan Nonte, University Relations
The Duke Energy Foundation has awarded a $150,000 grant to the UNCG Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC) to promote electrical safety among immigrants, particularly Spanish speakers.
The CNNC plans to use the grant to create bilingual safety materials: booklets with a home checklist for consumers, flyers for students in English as a Second Language classes and public service announcements for Spanish-language radio stations. For those with low literacy skills, photo-novellas will contain information about emergency preparedness.
“Safety is vitally important to Duke Energy, not just for our employees, but for the public,” said Ellen Ruff, president of Duke Energy Carolinas. “As the Hispanic population has grown in our service area, so have our efforts to communicate safety messages in Spanish.”
The Duke Energy-CNNC Consumer Safety Education Project intends to distribute safety information through additional channels, including churches; a bilingual web site; its workshops, which reach more than 1,000 people each year; and a Spanish-language radio program hosted by Nolo Martinez, the center’s assistant director for research and outreach.
This grant will allow the CNNC to build on the success of earlier efforts, which the Duke Energy Foundation supported with a $50,000 grant. The original grant, received about 18 months ago, helped CNNC develop 12 public service announcements, host more than 30 programs and share information at more than a dozen conferences.
The project will do more than simply translate safety messages into Spanish. It will address cultural issues as well. For instance, Latinos are more likely than members of many other ethnic groups to bring a charcoal grill indoors for heat during a winter power outage. They often are unaccustomed to such cold weather and unaware of the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Overcoming language and cultural barriers is an urgent challenge, because the state’s immigrant community is large and rapidly growing. The number of Hispanics in North Carolina grew 450 percent between 1990 and 2000 to almost 380,000, according to the Census Bureau.
The Pew Hispanic Center estimates the state’s Latino population has risen to 600,000. Roughly half of these immigrants understand and speak English poorly, the Census Bureau has found, preventing many from receiving information and services related to safety, health care and education.
The Center for New North Carolinians, part of UNCG’s School of Human Environmental Sciences, promotes the well-being of immigrants through research and outreach.
Duke Energy is a diversified energy company with a portfolio of natural gas and electric businesses, both regulated and unregulated, and an affiliated real estate company. Duke Energy supplies, delivers and processes energy for customers in the Americas, including 28,000 megawatts of regulated generating capacity in the United States. Duke Energy’s Carolinas operations include a diverse mix of nuclear, coal-fired, natural gas and hydroelectric generation that provides 19,900 megawatts of safe, reliable and competitively priced electricity to more than 2.2 million electric customers in a 22,000 square mile service area of North Carolina and South Carolina. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Duke Energy is a Fortune 500 company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DUK. More information about the company is available on the Internet at: www.duke-energy.com.
