500! Outreach team smashes event record

By Samantha Vercellino

CUB’S outreach team: First row: Aimee Gendusa-English, Yami Newell, Sarah Moskowitz; Second Row: Hilary Snover, Paulina Rios and Ivonne Hernandez. Not pictured: Laura Goldberg, Matt Harvey and Scott Allen.

CUB’s outreach team logged thousands of miles across Illinois to hold a record-breaking 500 events this year.

The new record blows away last year’s total of 400 events, which seemed a hard record to beat. Outreach Director Sarah Moskowitz credits the success to an expanded department and hard work by CUB’s nine-member outreach team.

Always an important part of CUB’s mission, outreach received even greater emphasis in 2014, as ComEd and Ameren launched historic improvements to the power grid. CUB wants to be a leader in showing consumers how to take advantage of those changes to save energy and money. The team brought on several new faces, and also opened an office in Hillsboro—CUB’s first office in central Illinois.

“I was really excited to learn that we hosted 500 money-saving events this year,” said Outreach Director Sarah Moskowitz. “I believe the extra hands we had on staff really helped us achieve this extraordinary accomplishment.”

The outreach team also deserves kudos for showing consumers how to cut their utility bills by $33,500 in 2014. Ivonne Hernandez, a two-year member of the department, put her cost-cutting skills to work at a Chicago utility-bill clinic and helped a consumer slash costs by $600 a year.

If you are part of a large group that would like to have CUB come to an event, please email Paulina Rios, at prios@citizensutilityboard.org, or call 312-263-4282.