[Music] back on the plan Tracy Wimer from Consumers Energy joins us and you recently announced the 2024 people Award winners so who are they and what is that yeah so the people awards are one of our three signature grants that the Consumers Energy Foundation gives out every year and these Focus specifically on addressing basic needs in Michigan and so the two nonprofits um that were selected the Community Food Club and Grand Rapids and uh PK cares in Ascot are both uh expanding the programs that they currently have to make sure people are able to get fresh healthy food that's affordable for them um and so with Community Food Club they have a a store essentially that people can come to and buy very very low cost donated food uh and PK cares is going to have a hydroponic garden and a rural area they're going to have a Community Food Bank and a lot of different great projects that these $250,000 grants each are going to go toward it to help them help more people that is so exciting yeah you give these out annually yeah yep um so the foundation does three signature grants every year the planet Awards um which we've discussed before and that focuses on um you know taking care of michigans wonderful natural resources these people awards which help address basic needs and the prosperity Awards which help uh for economic development when is the window open to apply for those Awards or to do you apply for them or do you nominate someone yeah yep so what happens is we invite nonprofits to send us what's called a letter of intent and it's basically a very brief synopsis of what their project is and then we select based on those letters people who we invite to apply for the full Grant and so it's usually only a handful of organizations that get invited because the application process is really long but we really really thoroughly vet them because we one want to make sure of course that they're going to be able to actually implement the projects that they want to do but second we want to make sure that we're hitting a a diverse uh number of places right so that's why one of these is FOC F in a major city and one of these is focused in a rural area where there's not much access to this kind of so what can we expect next from the Consumers Energy Foundation yeah so next up will be the prosperity award which I mentioned and that um the window for that for application process has already closed but we're going to be announcing in October the winners again that's another $250,000 Grant and two people or two organizations or two nonprofits are going to get them and we're very excited to see what they do next Community Foundation has a broad scope of of this is just one of the things that you do what are some of the other things that they do yeah absolutely so another big uh pocket of investment is we have diversity equity and inclusion grants that we give to organizations on a regular basis and that really helps them expand to make sure not only that their uh the work that they're doing is inclusive but that their hiring practices are as well great job amazing information Consumers Energy consumersenergy.com if you'd like more information about the foundation and everything else thank you Tracy thank you guys [Music]