JDH announces winners of the Patricia Hillman Award for Safety Culture Excellence

September 10, 2025

JDH is proud to present the Patricia Hillman Award for Safety Culture Excellence, an annual recognition named in honor of company matriarch and historian Patricia Hillman. This award celebrates the JDH location that best demonstrates an outstanding commitment to building and sustaining a strong safety culture—one of the company’s most important values.

For the first time in company history, two facilities have earned this prestigious honor. Congratulations to Gold Star’s Springville, New York, facility and the JDH Pixley, California, plant. Gold Star is a subsidiary of JDH.

At JDH, safety is the foundation of our operations and the guiding principle behind our first core value: “We take care of one another because we value safety.” With safety at the center of how we work, we recognize locations that are always continuously improving their standards.

Springville, New York has built a hands-on safety culture where every team member is expected to contribute daily. Compliance efforts go beyond minimum requirements, with each employee recording proactive safety actions in an online safety management system. This system not only tracks activity but also encourages personal accountability, ensuring that safety is owned by everyone on site.

Pixley, California advances cultural excellence through innovation. By implementing new technologies, the team has streamlined proactive safety actions, reducing friction in reporting and allowing employees to focus on consistent performance. Their use of digital tools helps identify risks earlier, resolve them faster, and maintain reliability across complex operations.

“Safety isn’t just a metric we track; it’s the way we work every single day,” said Dawn Moninger, EHS+ director. “Springville and Pixley took different paths to get there, but both show what it looks like when safety is woven into our culture.”

While we can’t split the trophy, Springville will display it for the first six months, and Pixley will take it home for the remainder of the year. Congratulations to both teams for setting the bar higher than ever.