LIVING LA VIDA LATINX

Lucy Farrimond is definitely a people person: For years, she helped IGS Energy customers navigate their natural gas plans as a team lead in the customer solutions center, and it was perfect for her personality.

That congeniality extends to her role as the leader of IGS’ Living La Vida Latinx employee Community. She’s passionate about getting to know the people in the group and helping create a safe space for people of Latinx descent to gather at work.

Born in Mexico City and raised five hours north of there in San Luis Potosí, Farrimond came to the United States after graduating high school to be with her parents, who had emigrated years earlier.

Like many public-school students in Mexico, Farrimond had taken English classes, and she supplemented them with after-school lessons. But when one doesn’t use language skills on a regular basis, fluency is a challenge. One of Farrimond’s foundational experiences in Columbus was taking English classes for New Americans at the old North High School in Clintonville. There, she met people from African, Asian and Latin countries.

“It gave me that opportunity to meet people without feeling out of place,” Farrimond says, “because they were in the same position I was.”

She says with so many more people of Latin descent in Columbus, it can be easy for people to stay in their comfort zones around others speaking Spanish. But outside of that comfort zone, she knows, is where growth happens. So she got uncomfortable.

The Living La Vida Latinx Community at IGS brings together people from diverse backgrounds who share Spanish as a native tongue. The 29 members hail from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Cuba.

“We have a space where we can share struggles, strategies, or just hang out,” she says.

Members are in Columbus, Colorado, Texas, Delaware, South Carolina and Chicago, and they stay connected via a group chat.

For 2022’s Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from mid-September to midOctober, the group invited a speaker to talk about the history of the Latinx Community in the United States. More than 50 IGS employees attended.

“For me, being a Latina, instead of it being something that I have to adapt to, I use it to help me,” Farrimond says. “One of the things that I love about IGS is that we embrace that. And I want our people in the Latinx Community to feel they can embrace their Latin side, and that they can use it as a strength to grow within the company.”