Essential Utilities and Employees Team Up for $800,000 Donation to United Way

Essential Utilities Inc. (NYSE: WTRG) announced today more than $800,000 in total contributions for the United Way during the company’s 2023-2024 giving campaign, The Essential Way. The total donation was achieved through a matching gift from the company’s Essential Foundation on top of individual pledges made by employees from its water and gas segments, Aqua and Peoples Natural Gas.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240403781019/en/

More than 2,000 employees participated in the campaign to support 479 deserving community organizations, including United Way organizations across Essential’s nine-state footprint and many other nonprofits in the United Way network. Aqua and Peoples have partnered with the United Way for more than two decades, donating more than $3.1 million in just the past four years since the companies united under Essential Utilities.

The United Way employee giving program allows team members to direct their contributions to causes that are important to them and their local community. Employees selected a variety of initiatives, including health and human services, education, housing and hunger relief, the environment, animal welfare and more. The corporate match will be directed to those same organizations through the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey and the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania, as the hosts of the campaign.

“While I am absolutely thrilled by our team’s generosity, I'm not surprised—our Essential employees are deeply passionate about improving the communities we serve, through the work we do each day in providing Earth’s most natural resources, and by giving back to deserving community causes,” said Essential Chairman and CEO Christopher Franklin. “We are proud to partner with the United Way, and we look forward to continuing our collective positive impact that ripples across our service territory through meaningful contributions and employee volunteerism.”

In the Philadelphia region, the company ranked among the top 7% of over 250 workplace campaigns in the nine-county region served by the nonprofit. The campaign saw increased employee participation across the board, up 15.5% among employees company-wide, and 17% in the Greater Philadelphia region, from the 2022 campaign. This is a huge accomplishment and one of the highest increases across all sectors that host workplace campaigns.