ATLANTA — The U.S. Department of Labor awarded Georgia Tech’s Safety, Health Environmental Services (SHES) with a $950,000 grant to develop and provide trainings that promote warehouse safety to small and medium-sized businesses.
SHES is now offering free 1-hour and 4-hour safety trainings at locations across Georgia. The trainings, which focus on preventing injury and illness due to workplace exposures in warehouse environments, are open to private employees and employers in small and medium-size businesses that perform or manage warehousing activities. There will also be several courses offered to the public.
Training topics will include powered industrial truck safety, chemical hazards and communication, material and package handling, electrical safety, and lockout/tagout, as well as health issues such as ergonomic lifting, respiratory protection, temperature extremes, and more.
At the end of the grant period, all training material will enter the public domain on the SHES website. Real-time courses are conducted in English, but toward the grant’s end date, SHES plans to translate the material into Spanish.
According to SHES certified industrial hygienist Sean Castillo, the topic of warehouse safety was chosen in part because of the economic role played by the greater Savannah area, where the port and its logistics and distributions centers constitute a significant part of the region’s economy. At the same time, however, warehouse safety far transcends that specific sector. “Warehousing is everywhere across the state,” said Castillo, “and we have a lot of experience in that area.”
Some of the safety trainings will be co-led by the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP). With more than 65 years serving a wide network of manufacturing partners statewide, GaMEP is an ideal partner.
“GaMEP does exemplary work in every corner of the state, and a lot of that is due to the extensive outreach of their regional managers,” said Castillo. “This synergistic partnership presents a great opportunity for us to leverage those relationships to help reinforce a culture of health and safety among Georgia’s industries.”
Both SHES and GaMEP are programs of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2), Georgia Tech’s economic development and outreach unit. As a socioeconomic development organization, EI2 takes a people-centered approach to programming, focusing on the ways that families and communities across Georgia — and beyond — benefit directly from its offerings.
Said EI2 Vice President David Bridges, “We are committed to translating Georgia Tech’s world-class research into real-life solutions that create jobs, save lives, and keep America safe. These warehouse safety trainings exemplify those goals exactly. Because they are being offered by two of our programs, SHES and GaMEP, they also embody the strength that comes from collaboration, which allows us to extend our reach of service even more.”
Funding for the safety training is administered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and comes from the Susan Harwood Training Grants Program, named for the late Susan Harwood, who served for 17 years as the director of OSHA’s Office of Risk Assessment. One of 18 Harwood Grant recipients for 2025, SHES was chosen for its expertise, training capabilities, and existing relationships with OSHA.
SHES is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor to provide a range of confidential OSHA programs to industries in the Southeast, and the authorized OSHA Training Institute Education Center at the Georgia Tech – Savannah campus has been offering OSHA training in South Georgia, South Carolina, and northern Florida for 25 years.
For more information and schedule, click here.