How the Top Team at Allegiant Partners Incorporated Put their Community and the Earth First

I’m the president of API. I was promoted to president at the beginning of this year, and previously, I was the chief risk officer and chief credit officer. I rose through the ranks of the company on the credit side, but was always involved in the accounting side, with a little bit of sales management and operations assistance mixed in. I’ve been with the company for 17 years, since 2004.

I’ve been with the company for three years now as HR manager, following an HR management career of about 13 years. I came on board to support API in creating HR policies and processes.

I have been with API for just under a year, and before this I had a social work-related career. I naturally transitioned into HR, and have many different responsibilities here, including as head of the company’s Culture Committee. I also work with insurance and benefits, do a lot of onboarding of new hires, and support Lauren and Raquel.

Usually in the US, California takes the lead in most environmental regulations and laws, and has the most aggressive greenhouse gas emissions standards. One example is a cap-and-trade program that started in 2012 and limited the amount of greenhouse gas emissions companies are allowed to emit every year. If they go over their allowance, they had to buy more credits, typically from other companies that produce clean, alternative energy.

CalCAP is a program sponsored by the California Air Resources Board. It was created to encourage lenders and financial institutions, like AP, to make loans to small businesses for clean diesel engines for medium and heavy-duty engines. It’s been very successful and, since its creation, API has financed roughly 600 clean diesel trucks for 525 companies, making approximately $46 million in loans.

Our goal is to always try to think about ways to make the environment a better place. Thanks to this program, we’re able to offer small businesses the competitive financing without which they would continue to use dirty trucks.

A lot of these arborists also do clean-up work in the mid-west or on the east coast. When there is a hurricane in Florida, for example, they’ll take a crew to that area and spend three months just cleaning up. These aren’t just logging companies cutting down trees and selling lumber, they treat trees and help keep them alive, when possible, while also strategically cutting down trees and clearing brush from areas that are susceptible to catching fire.In the United States, though people might not be accustomed to thinking of their state as a potential victim of climate change, hurricanes, bushfires, or tornadoes, the reality remains that you might suffer from the consequences of global warming are real. And these consequences cannot be ignored. API works to compensate for the damage that can be felt, as well as working to prevent any damage from climate change.

This isn’t a quick presentation where you take a short quiz afterwards. It’s very engaging, and is required for all employees. The professor discusses real life situations, and we receive a lot of good questions and candid thoughts and feelings from our employees, which gives us as manager better insight into the cross section of the cultures of our company.

I see DEI as the core part of creating a sustainable company -- and world. We all know sustainability is really important to the environment, but by encouraging involvement and participation from all members of our community, we get more diversity in our recruiting, which makes us a better business. I feel it’s our job as a group to help with that, and I think our diversity is only going to expand further.

We’re part of a global company, the Tokyo Century Group, so there’s a lot of different cultures. To us as managers, being diverse and having a global outlook is going to be beneficial for Tokyo Century USA long term.

I’m head of the culture committee, and one example of how we get involved in our local community is raising funds through bingo nights. We put on a fun event for our employees, and all of the funds that we raise during that event will go to a local non-profit. Not only that, we involve AP’s employees in deciding what organizations we want to fundraise for. It’s just been a great opportunity for us to get our employees involved in the community.

We send a survey company-wide asking what organization employees are passionate about and why, and then we come together as a leadership group and donate money to those organizations every year. This year, we donated about $6,000 to roughly 10 different organizations -- and our employees really appreciate this.

We’ll continue to prioritize sustainability and diversity. We’ve always been big proponents of the environment and sustainability, but being part of Tokyo Century USA and understanding the group’s corporate culture means we’re making it even more of a priority than before.

From an HR perspective, I think promoting diversity in recruitment is something we want to expand. We want individuals who have the kind of differences that will make a difference to our company. We also want to start looking at career development opportunities within Tokyo Century USA, which I think is really exciting.

I want to keep coming up with creative ways to get everybody involved in our company’s culture, and implement DEI more through the Culture Committee.