Elena Menshenina: "With a strong team and management’s support, you can move mountains!"

29 january 2024

Our January issue of the About People and Good Deeds column features an interview with Elena Menshenina, a leading expert of Nyagangazpererabotka, discussing her efforts to nurture eco-habits at her company and to help a shelter for stray animals in the harsh conditions of the North’s cold and snowy winters.

Elena, how did your volunteering journey begin?
It all started for me in 2021 with the city marathon A Race for Cleanliness that pitted 10 teams from Nyagan’s enterprises. I was my team’s captain. We were required to perform five tasks during the marathon, something we were given two months to complete. We made a video titled Imagine our future that was dedicated to environmental conservation. We organized collection of old batteries, ended up collecting 81 kg of those, and became absolute leaders of the race. There was a separate assignment to develop 6 eco-habits and this was where we had to get our colleagues from Nyagangazpererabotka and members of our families actively involved. The marathon’s final phase was a plogging race (where your collect trash while jogging), and our team was assigned a separate area for collecting trash and waste. After taking part in the eco-marathon, I felt that I wanted to do more.

It looks like that eco-marathon became a pivotal moment in the development of your company's volunteering movement?
Indeed. All our volunteering activities that are taking place at Nyagangazpererabotka now got launched after that Race for Cleanliness eco-marathon.

Why do you keep volunteering?
Being a volunteer is a noble cause. It's wonderful to be able to make the world cleaner and kinder. After each volunteering event, my heart sings and I get a boost of positive energy. And you keep asking yourself: "if not me, then who else? " It's particularly encouraging to see the results of your own volunteering efforts. Just yesterday, we succeeded in placing a homeless puppy with a family, and it made us so happy that we basked in positive emotions.

Is there a large volunteering team at your company?
Our facility employs 160 people, and 16 of them are the backbone of our team. We have a chat that we use to stay in touch as we organize our volunteering visits. Of course, support of your colleagues and managers is very important if you are a volunteer. I would like to take this opportunity and thank all employees of Nyagangazpererabotka and especially its management for their help and personal involvement. The motto I go by as I do my volunteering work is: "With a powerful team and management’s support, you can move mountains!"

Please tell us about the project "Eco-education as a norm of life" that you have successfully implemented. How did you come up with the idea to carry out such a worthy project in Nyagan?
The idea of the project came to me out of a sudden. My daughter's homeroom teacher once shared a video that she had made while she on vacation. In the video there were children standing next to a stand with eco-posters, studying it in detail and directing questions at their parents. I immediately felt that I wanted to install a similar eco-stand in our own city so that it would serve as a visual training aid not only for our children, but also for other active people eager to learn about the environment in general and about development of eco-habits. I submitted an application to a contest of employees’ volunteering projects and my entry won a grant.

What else have you succeeded in doing within the framework of this project besides the eco-stand?
In addition to setting up our eco-stand, we organized a plogging event that was joined by our company's employees. We managed to collect a whole truckful of garbage and cleaned up the park’s grounds. We made a "before" and "after” video that shows how the park got transformed as a result of just one environmental cleanup.

Have you been able to keep this park area clean?
We visit this park area often as one of the volunteers at the Paw of Help shelter lives near there. It still looks much cleaner, the locals have stopped treating the area as an unauthorized waste dump. I hope people will continue keeping this park area clean.

Some items were even given a second lease on life after your plogging event...
That’s right. The tires that we collected there were taken by one of our employees back to his summer place, he painted them and converted them into flower beds. During the plogging exercise, we also found an antique desk lamp. One of our employees cleaned it up and it is now adorning his own desk.

I know that you and your colleagues have been helping the Paw of Help shelter for stray animals.
We started assisting this shelter after we installed this special box on the company’s premises to collect food for the shelter’s animals. The Paw of Help is being funded and maintained thanks to the efforts of two volunteers. We paid a visit to the shelter with my colleagues and appraised the situation there. Following that, we built two new dog houses there. One of our colleagues even donated her own kennel which we moved to the shelter. We also helped them finish building their barn that had not yet been fully ready for winter. And we helped level the site’s grounds with gravel.

Are there any nuances in assisting a shelter under harsh winter conditions?
Last winter was really rather harsh, both in terms of snowfall and low temperatures. In order to help the animals survive the winter, it is important that they are well-fed and provided with sufficient heat. So, as we were preparing for winter, we bought some hay for the shelter. Even at minus 50C, we still traveled to the Paw of Help shelter and helped remove the snow. Some of the things we did were nothing short of small feats. One of our employees rushed to the shelter in very cold weather after the barn door broke down, he got there 20 minutes after I posted a message about that in our chat.

Now that the cold front is gone, we try to visit the shelter every weekend to remove as much snow as possible so as to avoid potential flooding come springtime.

You oversee activities carried out as part the Kind Caps initiative at your enterprise. What have your already been able to achieve along these lines?
Before 2021, I hadn’t known why it might be necessary to collect caps, what all of that was for. We then met with the supervisor of the initiative in Nyagan at the eco-marathon, watched a video about what can be achieved by collecting caps together with my colleagues, and we got to work making such collections.

These days, our box gets filled up in a matter of a month or so. We have accustomed all our colleagues to doing that, it has become a matter of corporate culture to collect plastics and caps separately. Each department at Nyagangazpererabotka now has a small box to collect plastic caps. After each meeting, empty plastic bottles and use caps get disposed of separately.

Last year, you took part in SIBUR's 4th Volunteering Forum. Would care to share your impressions of the event?
After attending last year’s volunteers’ forum, I probably spent a couple of weeks smiling all the time thanks to the incredible boost of energy that event had given me. The forum is the ultimate gathering of positive, interesting, and open people. I am very glad that I was able to attend the forum. After the forum, I started to communicate with many of my colleagues that I had met there. It is a real community of like-minded kind-natured people where everyone is supportive of each other. This was an incredible experience. Prior to visiting the forum, I would never have thought that SIBUR had so many caring employees. Now I am inspired to do even more good.

What are the things that have to be taken into account when organizing a volunteering project or campaign? What should one pay particular attention to?
In our city, one has to take into account the weather and be ready to postpone the event based on what the weather is like. You can never know for sure what spring and summer might be like.
The second thing we realized is that it is necessary to get together as a team one last time in the run-up to our key events and once again talk everything through. Hold a final prep meeting, in other words. Especially if a lot of participants are going to be involved. It is important to not only assign duties but also to check completion of all individual tasks assigned to the members of the team at the end. This is not that much about strict control on the part of the project’s management, but rather about face-to-face communication within the team. Exchanging messages on the team’s chat is not enough. It is much more difficult to adjust something on the fly than to think of all those things in advance.

If we were to turn to the readers of this interview who are thinking about doing good, where do they start?
You just need to try what if feels like to be a volunteer. Obviously, on weekends you’d want to get some rest after working all week. I have colleagues who were once exactly like that, but now they gladly take part in our volunteering trips. They bring their whole families to the shelter, and start getting ready for the trip a few days in advance. At outings like that you get to mix the useful with the pleasant by working outdoors, taking walks, spending time with your children. As chair of our company’s trade union, I see this as an opportunity to socialize with my colleagues in an informal setting at our volunteering events.

In conclusion, let me ask you about your nearest plans. What good deeds do you intend to perform?
This year’s focus will be on building a large enclosure on the grounds of the Paw of Help shelter. We will continue collecting food for the animals and organizing trips to the shelter. We will also film a social video stressing the fact that one should not abandon one’s pets, in keeping with the motto of "we are responsible for those we have tamed."