Safety Education Grant For Wineries

Safety Education Grant For Wineries

I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.

The Department of Labor and Industries recently awarded the Washington Wine Industry Foundation with a $174 thousand safety and health investment project grant for small to mid-sized wineries. Executive Director of the Washington Wine Industry Foundation, Vicky Scharlau, explains the grant laid out a fair amount of detail in terms of how the WWIF would approach putting this grant to work.

SCHARLAU: We help identify issues in the industry, then go seek grant funding for specific projects. So, we’ve already identified some specific needs within the state of Washington’s wine industry - making sure that we can first assess what the overall needs of these small and mid-sized wineries are, prioritize the knowledge in the training gaps that exist in these small businesses and then put together really effective training programs in methods that will be useful to small businesses.

Scharlau says they have about a year to complete the grant.

SCHARLAU: The great part about this is that, while we have a year to complete the grant, what we will end up with at the end of that year are various tools that we will have pre-identified as being useful to full and part-time employees in small wineries, because most of the 750 wineries we have in Washington State have less than 20 employees and many of them don’t have the resources - either in resources for having specific staff that would be responsible for training, or resources just in terms of the size of the company. But that doesn’t negate the fact that there are in fact hazards in wineries that people just need to be fully aware of.

I’m Lacy Gray and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Ag Information Network.