Every year, the Safety Fest TN event convenes with the goal of sharing important messages about home and workplace safety. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 5,283 workplace injuries result in fatalities every year in the United States. That is why the message of safety is so important. This year’s Safety Fest took place during the last week of April with many activities, demonstrations, and presentations touting a “safety first” message. Let’s dive a little deeper into Safety Fest and ORAU’s impact on the event:
What is Safety Fest?
We already talked a little about the main theme of Safety Fest, but let’s narrow down the focus. According to the official Safety Fest website, the event is the combined efforts of federal, state and local governments, large and small businesses, and non-profit organizations that come together to promote safety and health at work, at home and in the community.
Safety Fest TN provides a week of free safety and health training annually in Oak Ridge and Knoxville and is dedicated to the mission of making the region the safest place to work and live in the United States. The safety and health classes, demonstrations, and workshops are free to the public to ensure that everyone can learn essential safety skills.
Highlights of the festivities
Safety Fest is a weeklong event, and every day is packed full of activities for the community. From safety and health classes inside the classrooms at the New Hope Visitor Center to outdoor demonstrations that fill the parking lot, the action was buzzing all week long. Some of the demonstrations included a power line safety demonstration by the Knoxville Utilities Board, a landing and take-off by a Tennessee Army National Guard Blackhawk helicopter, and a visit from the Tennessee Highway Patrol.
ORAU’s presence at Safety Fest
ORAU was proud to serve as a sponsor for Safety Fest TN in 2025. In addition to being a sponsor, ORAU hosted CPR and first aid courses presented by EnergySolutions and the Oak Ridge Fire Department at the newly renovated Pollard Center on ORAU’s main campus in Oak Ridge.
ORAU’s Davyda Hammond, Ph.D., also led a session titled “Mastering Work and Life: The Critical Role of Psychological Safety,” which focused on how psychological safety impacts the goals of achieving your greatest potential at work and in your personal life. Some of the topics discussed included burnout, instability, and what it means to achieve psychological safety.
“Psychological safety boils down to trying to integrate work life and home life because at the end of the day, the way we show up to work is influenced by what we do at home and vice versa,” said Hammond. Part of what influenced Hammond to give this presentation is that it ties into much of the work that she does with ORAU. “At ORAU, we do a lot of work on safety culture assessments, and psychological safety is something that has come up often with our customers. You must get in the minds of the people to understand what they are motivated by. We, at ORAU, are thought leaders in this space, and we want to be able to provide answers and our expertise in the realm of how this issue affects our customers and the community.”
A broader look at ORAU’s safety culture
Running a safe operation is not just something that ORAU management strives to do. It’s a foundational part of our culture and every employee is responsible for putting safety first in each part of the job.
As a result of this pledge for safety, ORAU, as managing contractor, is committed to performing work safely as it operates the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) for the U.S. Department of Energy. In fact, this commitment to safety has ensured ORISE has operated as a Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) Star site for safety excellence every year since 2004. This certification has been awarded in recognition of an exemplary safety and health record. With more than a decade of consistent safety excellence recognized by the Voluntary Protection Program, we have safety principles deeply embedded in the company culture.
We also launched the VPPhD program in 2016 to engage ORAU employees with a new level of involvement in and awareness of the ORAU Safety Program. The ORAU VPPhD Program is an online training program that allows all employees to take their safety and environmental awareness to a new level both at home and on the job and earn recognition in the process. Employees are given a monetary award for the completion of the program.
ORAU is dedicated to the concepts of Integrated Safety Management (ISM) whereby employees and subcontractors are expected to systematically define their scope of work, analyze the hazards to which they may be exposed, develop and implement hazard controls, perform work within those controls, and provide feedback for continuous improvement. We have also mentored other companies in the past in setting up and running successful safety culture programs at their organizations.
In short, every employee at ORAU takes safety very seriously in all aspects of what we do, and that’s why we take pride in being a part of Safety Fest TN each year.
“Our company was born out of the Manhattan Project. The reason we have Safety Fest is because of the Manhattan Project, and that’s such a big piece of our story,” said Hammond. “We also have an impactful program in worker health. Our worker health program is not just about worker health, but it’s also about worker safety because safety and health go together. The fact that we are leaders in worker health means that when safety and health people get together, we need to be in that space and be a part of the conversation.”
Now that you know a little more about Safety Fest and how it ties into ORAU’s safety culture, be sure to check out our website for more information about our impact in organizational and safety culture evaluations.