At This Company, It Pays To Give

By: Diana T. Barth
Published: 04/15/11

Last Thursday, several employees of Onset Computer Corporation were not working on the company’s data loggers, the devices used to track data concerning everything from light intensity to temperature to energy use to humidity.

Instead, they were out behind the company’s MacArthur Boulevard facility potting flowering plants that were to be delivered the next day to the Riverview School in East Sandwich, a residential school for adolescents and young adults with complex language, learning and cognitive disabilities.

Company president Justin Testa said Onset has begun a new philanthropic program, in which each of the corporation’s 120 employees will be encouraged to take a day off with pay in order to give four to eight hours of service to their chosen cause.

Laurie Colwell, Onset’s human resources director, chose the Riverview School flower project for the program’s kickoff, she said, because the school is local, the company’s employees know the school and “it’s a good opportunity to help kids.” The potted plants are headed to the school for use in that facility’s greenhouse program.

The outdoor planting effort was also a good way to start the spring season as well as the program, she said.

Kim Baillie, who had not yet decided which charity she might focus on, normally works in Onset’s production department, but was happily planting impatiens last week. A good many of her co-workers were getting their hands dirty alongside her, Mr. Testa among them.

There was ice cream available, something that reminded a few employees of one of the uses for their product.

The more than a million data loggers they have sold are used to monitor the performance of green buildings, the output of energy conversion systems, and in coastal research. One employee said she had just started working at Onset in the summer of 1995, when Ben and Jerry’s first used the data loggers to prove that their ice cream stayed frozen from the time it left its Vermont plant heading via truck to its final destination.

The company provided Onset employees with gallons of its product that year.

Onset Computer has been in operation since 1981 and has expanded from its original location in a barn behind a home not far from its current, modern facility at 470 MacArthur Boulevard in Pocasset. Information about the company is online at www.onsetcomp.com.