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BP in Alaska: Legacy of corporate citizenship, social investment
Frank Baker For Petroleum News
Alaska is large in landmass but small in population, and today more than ever, the company’s 2,000 employees are making a difference across the state. Employees currently support more than 700 community and education organizations and 150 youth teams in about 40 Alaska communities, either in direct contributions or volunteerism.
“BP Alaska has long believed it can best support communities by helping to build skills and leadership, growing community capacity, and helping to bring about measurable and long-term community improvement,” says Carla Beam, BP Alaska’s director of community affairs. “Today, in the spirit of BP’s Fabric of America philosophy, our employees represent the frontline in reaching out to Alaska communities in a very direct and personal way, and ultimately making those communities better places to live.”
During its long history of social investment in the state, BP has been a private sector leader in the advancement of education, health care and social services. Major, multiyear contributions to the University of Alaska at Anchorage and Fairbanks, Providence Hospital, and the Alaska Native Heritage Center have dramatically improved the quality of services provided by these and other Alaska institutions.
BP is one of the largest private sector investors in Alaska, but its investments extend beyond business to the communities where it operates and where its employees and their families live.
Fostering financial literacy For more than 30 years, BP has partnered with the Alaska Council on Economic Education to promote teaching of economics in Alaska’s public schools. BP’s support has helped teachers incorporate economics into the classroom, promoted teacher certification in economics and sponsored advanced placement courses, required for schools that want to offer advanced placement economics.
Nurturing a new workforce
Recruiting and training a skilled Alaska workforce is key to BP’s long-term success. Since 2006, the company has increased its Alaskan workforce by more than 40 percent to nearly 2,000 employees. As BP’s workforce ages and retires, the company actively supports statewide vocational and college programs that promote careers in oil, gas, mining and other process industries.
Since 1999, the Alaska Process Industry Careers Consortium has been cultivating the next generation of employees through information and training, as well as scholarships, internships and career awareness activities for Alaska students.
Through APICC, industry-related companies develop definitions for industry job classifications, which are implemented in university and other training curricula.
Alaska Grown Engineers The Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage is now recognized nationally for its groundbreaking work in attracting Native students to the hard sciences and busting stereotypes in the process. But it wasn’t always that way, according to Herb Schroeder, the engineering professor at UAA who founded the program in the late 1990s.
Schroeder worked with BP to start the Summer Bridge Program with eight students in 1998. The program, one of five components of ANSEP, takes recent high school graduates through a nine-week regime to prepare them for college-level math and science. The Summer Bridge Program has grown to 36 students from all over Alaska.
BP also hires interns and graduates. The latter is significant, Schroeder said, because it means ANSEP graduates are competing successfully with college graduates from schools in the Lower 48 states.
Investing in higher education The partnership between BP and the University of Alaska goes back decades and spans a broad array of programs, initiatives and academic disciplines. BP has long supported petroleum engineering and research, including training and scholarship programs to increase the number of students going into science and engineering fields.
The partnership stepped up to a new level in 2000, when as part of the provisions in a Charter agreement with the State of Alaska, BP committed to a defined level of charitable contributions each year based on the production and price levels of Alaska North Slope crude. Thirty percent of each year’s total contributions go to the University of Alaska Foundation.
In 2007 alone, the contributions supported hiring or continuation of professors in educational technology, public health, education and fine arts. Charter funds support research and instructional initiatives in fields such as human development in the Arctic, distance learning and educational technology, fisheries and marine science, and Alaska’s 50th Anniversary Statehood Project. Since 2000, BP has contributed $30 million to the University of Alaska.
Knowledge source
of comfort, hope
A diagnosis of cancer is shocking, terrifying, bewildering. Many cancer patients and their families have a voracious need to learn: They want to read everything they can get their hands on. Yet the resources themselves can be confusing at best and more often overwhelming. A partnership between BP and Providence Alaska has resulted in a new information program that makes such information easily accessible.
Early learning: BP was an early and committed partner in Best Beginnings, a public-private initiative organized to promote early learning and literacy.
Studies are showing unequivocally that early learning experience from birth to age 6 has a profound impact on later success in school and in life. Economists say that investments in early learning yield impressive benefits through higher productivity and far fewer social costs.
Best Beginnings is mobilizing people and resources to establish the systems required to ensure that every child in Alaska has the knowledge and skills to be ready for school.
Investing in alternative energy BP is looking to alternative energy to help meet the world’s demand for energy that emits little or no carbon — such as biofuels, solar, wind, hydrogen and gas-fired power.
That effort is embodied in BP’s partnership with the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks. The work is a demonstration project that combines several sources of renewable energy to power small-scale energy demands in Alaska on a year-round basis.
The Hybrid Micro-Energy Research Project consists of solar photovoltaic tracking solar arrays, two different types of solar hot water collectors, wind generation and a biomass-fired combined heat and power unit. The energy sources together provide heat and power year-round to the CCHRC’s Research Test Facility. The HMEP became operational in spring 2008.
The hybrid system is designed for the high-latitude challenge of minimal solar energy during the winter when energy demand is greatest and bountiful solar energy in the summer when demand is minimal.
Corporate citizenship matures In 2008, BP contributed more than $10 million to support more than 200 nonprofit and educational organizations and programs in Alaska.
BP supports many educational and workforce development programs, and provides 25 four-year scholarships each year to graduating high school seniors statewide.
BP also recognizes 30 outstanding educators through the annual Teachers of Excellence program.
In 2008, BP Alaska employees contributed more than $500,000 to United Way and other community and education organizations. They also contributed thousands of volunteer hours. The company matches employee donations, volunteer hours and fundraising efforts.
BP Energy Center The BP Energy Center was built to support the community.
Since opening in 2002, more than 100,000 visitors have passed through the center.
This facility is a training, meeting and conference center and is available without charge to nonprofits and education organizations from throughout Alaska.
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