Dolan is a former fighter jet pilot in the U.S. Marine Corps, where she spent a dozen year and was the first woman to fly AV-8B Harrier in combat. That was in Iraq, where Dolan, or “Dookie” to her fellow Devil Dogs, served two six-month tours.

Dolan, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1996, is one of 10,000 U.S. military veterans employed by GE. This high number is no accident. “We actively recruit from the military because we have learned that the values you bring to our company are essential to our success,” Jeff Immelt, GE Chairman and CEO, said in a speech at West Point in 2009. Immelt wants to make GE the “employer of choice” for veterans.

Dolan taking off from an aircraft carrier.

Dolan joined GE directly from the Marine Corps through the Junior Officer Leadership Program (JOLP). The program offers veterans three eight-month rotations within different divisions of the company. She says that even though “the Marine Corps is a very special place, so I might be a little biased,” she found GE “very friendly to veterans.”

She says that JOLP is a great way to transition. Dolan was able to approach senior executives to discuss job options and career paths. “The program gives you great visibility,” says Dolan. “It encourages you to set up meetings and seek mentorship. Everybody has kept their doors open.”

Dolan comes from a family of military pilots. Her father served in Vietnam and her brother flew during the first Iraq war.

Dolan says that her career as military pilot taught her the “ability to think logically and not to be afraid to step up and make a decision.” During her flights over Iraq, Dolan made decisions with severe consequences. “People’s lives were at stake,” says Dolan. She finds her experience applicable at GE. “Our products are responsible for keeping people alive.”

Dolan still flies in her spare time, Cessnas, Pipers, even a Czech Aero L39 trainer jet, developed to train Warsaw Pact pilots. “I’m convinced that nothing will ever compare to flying the Harrier,” she says.

That’s why two years ago GE established a $50 million program called Developing Health. The program is designed to support non-profit community health centers and improve access to primary care in underserved communities across America. It is administered by GE’s philanthropic arm, the GE Foundation.

(L-R) GE Foundation President and Chairman Bob Corcoran, Jessie Trice Community Health Center Board Chair Paul Roberts, Jessie Trice Community Health Center Chief Medical Officer Deborah George, M.D., Community Health of South Florida CEO Brodes H. Hartley, Jr., Citrus Health Center CEO Mario Jardon, Miami Beach Community Health Center CEO Kathryn Abbate, Helen B. Bentley Community Health Center CEO Caleb A. Davis and Health Choice Network of Florida CEO Kevin Kearns.

Developing Health is currently active in 17 American cities and the program just made its largest donation yet: $3 million to Health Choice Network of Florida to fight chronic diabetes in Miami-Dade County. The grant will establish a healthcare center for 10,000 local patients who suffer from chronic diabetes and its serious complications such as eye problems, heart disease and hypertension. The goal is to provide high quality care that will decrease expensive hospital stays and emergency room visits.

Data analysis will drive the center’s efforts: The center will rely on data to improve its work. It will warehouse and analyze existing electronic medical records, and build real-time, disease specific patient groups to achieve better treatment results.

GE Foundation chose Miami Dade because 11.4% of the county’s residents 18 and older suffer from diabetes. That’s 37% above the national average of 8.3% of diabetics in the total U.S. population. The county also leads the state of Florida with the highest total number of uninsured people, some 600,000, or 30.2% of the population.

To date, the program has distributed $17 million in grants to providers and programs serving over 650,000 people in the U.S. The program follows GE’s Developing Health Globally initiative, which launched in 2004 and invests more than $100 million per year to improve healthcare access in 14 countries across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It is also aligned with GE’s Healthymagination initiative, whose goals include improved access to quality healthcare, new health technologies and lower costs.

GE CEO and Chairman Jeff Immelt with West Point Military Academy cadets Joseph Carothers, George Kingma and Gerome Anthony, who participated in three-week externships this summer at GE’s headquarters in Fairfield, CT.

To help achieve GE CEO and Chairman Jeff Immelt’s stated goal of making GE the “employer of choice for veterans,” Urbauer and others have intensified ongoing recruiting efforts. In addition to GE’s presence at the career fairs, and at major gatherings of vets, like the Marine Corps Marathon in October, the company has established and supported major programs aimed at helping vets bridge the military and civilian worlds:

• The Junior Officer Leadership Program provides junior officers a unique opportunity to work in three eight-month rotations with different GE businesses, with classroom instruction supplementing on the job training.
  
  
• In 2009, GE signed an agreement with the U.S. Army Reserve to guarantee priority consideration for job interviews for qualified participating soldiers no later than 30 days after completing military occupational specialty training.
  
  
• And GE is a founding member of American Corporate Partners, which offers mentoring and networking opportunities for transitioning veterans.
  
  

GE’s support doesn’t end once veterans are hired. In 2010, the company launched the GE Veterans Network as an affinity group to support those employees who’ve spent time protecting the country. The Veterans Network had its first national summit in May and, according to Urbauer, provides GE-employed veterans “with career development, advice and activities that can help propel them professionally.”

Urbauer, who spent 10 years in the army as an engineer officer, said the network is critical to making veterans comfortable within a big company. “We understand each other a little better,” she said. Urbauer added that GE’s support is nothing new: when she was called back into active duty after 9/11, she took a leave of absence for a year to work with the Army Corps of engineers at Ground Zero. “I knew I would have a job when I got back,” Urbauer said.

For more on GE’s multiple veterans’ initiatives, please click here.

One solution for changing this ratio sounds simple, but is often overlooked: Make more of an effort to interest girls in hard sciences from an early age. Which was precisely the goal of the inaugural GE Girls at MIT Summer Education workshop, held this July.

The week-long program offered 25 middle-school girls a fun and exciting window into the STEM sciences (science, technology, engineering, and math), as part of a renewed GE commitment to increasing the number of women in technology leadership roles. The students were selected from a pool of sixth-graders from three public schools in Lynn, Massachusetts, one of GE’s original locations.

Each student had access to a fun and thrilling curriculum, which was co-developed by GE and MIT. Classes were based around themes like construction, programming, electronics, aviation and chemistry. Workshops included a whirlwind of hands-on activities: programming their own computer games and LEGO robots, building and launching rockets, understanding airplane flight, developing a chemical recipe for lip gloss, creating flashlights, and even building ice cream makers. The girls were bused daily from GE’s Lynn location to MIT’s campus, and the week included tours and guest speakers. Meanwhile, the instructors included MIT professors, graduate students, and volunteers from the GE Women’s Network.

Joanne Kugler, leader of the GE’s Women and Technology Initiative, said of the program: “Our vision is to excite young girls around STEM and retain their interest as they head into high school, college and eventually the workforce (and maybe they’ll even work at GE). Knowing women will be over half of the future workforce, and that the U.S. must continue to grow and advance technology, this is a long term commitment.”

Next year, Kugler says the program will expand to two more GE locations and corresponding universities – specifically, GE’s Schenectady plant with a local New York university, and the Waukesha plant with a local Wisconsin university. In 2013, that expansion will continue even more. And by 2020, well, perhaps that ratio may be skewing in a different direction.

For much more on those efforts, be sure to check out GE’s comprehensive citizenship website. The site includes reams of data, like metrics for GE’s Ecomagination commitment, and a detailed breakdown by region and country of progress by GE’s suppliers in meeting citizenship expectations. Here are just three examples of how GE is doing well by doing good:

1. Using Less and Doing More with Rare Earth Minerals: Rhenium is a rare and semi-precious metal that is used as an alloying element in the aerospace industry, allowing jet engines to reach higher temperatures required in flight. But it’s also incredibly rare, mined primarily in the U.S., Chile and Kazakhstan, and its extraction leads to environmental consequences associated with mining and material disposal. GE’s program to reduce its reliance on rhenium combines new component design, developing advanced manufacturing techniques and boosting recycling and reuse of unserviceable engine parts. The result will be lower costs and better outcomes.
2. Nothing Happened to the Electric Car, It’s Here to Stay: One way GE has reduced its own carbon footprint is to commit to replacing 25,000 vehicles in its company fleet with EVs. The Yves Behar-designed WattStation provides quicker charging for EVs, complementing the storage and smart grid solutions that will aid widespread adoption, all part of GE’s citizenship in the strategic area of energy and climate change.
3. Improving Child Survival Rates: GE Healthcare is working to address UN Millennium Development Goal 4, which aims to reduce infant mortality rates by 2015. In addition to strategic philanthropy, GE has focused on bringing innovations like the Lullaby™ Warmer, which helps address the critical challenge of neonatal hypothermia, a leading cause of infant mortality, to markets where they are desperately needed.

As a new feature story just published on GE’s Citizenship website – which we’ve excerpted here — explains in detail, for the past 10 years GE Aviation has been working to lessen its dependence on rare minerals, including rhenium. The work is being accomplished through a combination of innovative component designs, advanced manufacturing processes and new alloys. Recycling materials from unserviceable engine parts is also being practiced to reduce the need for rhenium as a raw material in jet engine manufacturing. Through the GE Reclamation Program, GE Aviation is producing better outcomes for GE, its customers and the environment, saving millions of dollars by using recycled material.

“The goal of the program is to recycle, reuse and replace this rare metal,” said Ted Grossman, chief manufacturing engineer, GE Aviation. “Not only will it help us reduce our need for rhenium and lower costs, it is reducing the environmental impact associated with mining activities and material disposal.”

When alloyed with other materials from the periodic table, rhenium helps create strong superalloys necessary for the manufacture of high-pressure turbine (HPT) blades used in jet engines today. As early as the 1980s, engine makers discovered that nickel-based alloys containing rhenium were able to retain their strength at extremely high temperatures, providing durability, wear and extended life for certain engine components.

Not only is rhenium extremely rare at an average concentration of two parts per billion in the earth’s crust, it is very difficult to extract. Rhenium is not mined, but rather recovered and extracted as a byproduct of copper mining. Very little rhenium is actually processed and isolated each year as compared to the millions of tons of copper and millions of pounds of molybdenum that are extracted from the same copper deposits.

To put this into perspective, consider the following scenario. It takes, on average, approximately 120 metric tons (264,554 pounds) — or the equivalent weight of 44 Cadillac Escalade SUVs — of copper ore to produce 1 ounce of rhenium — or the equivalent weight of five U.S. quarter coins. The production of one HPT blade requires about 0.5 ounces of rhenium. The extraction processes required to mine that material are significant, as are the environmental impacts and carbon emissions that go along with them

GE’s three-pronged approach involves recycling metal grindings from the manufacturing process; GE Aviation metallurgists and engineers developing alloys that require less or zero rhenium; and reclaiming rhenium from used engine parts.

The full story on GE.com/citizenship explains how customers such as the U.S. Navy, one of the first participants in the reclamation program, are reaping huge cost savings and how the GE Aviation team is currently working to expand the program.

Raring to go: An operator prepares materials for the reclamation process..

*Read more citizenship stories on GE Reports
*Read about GE’s other materials work in Aviation

Kid power: The Developing Health announcement in Baltimore included a number of local events, such as one for BEE Healthy, GE’s national health awareness program for children. The “BEE” portion of BEE Healthy represents the goals to: Balance for stretching and flexibility; Exercise, and Eat healthy.

Georgia is the home of GE’s Energy business and 5,400 GE employees. It’s also where nearly one in four people of working age are without health insurance — with Atlanta ranked fifth in the nation for its number of uninsured residents. To help improve access, two non-profit community health centers in metro-Atlanta — West End Medical Centers and Southside Medical Center — were awarded a total of $1 million in grants.

The announcement by the GE Foundation, which is the company’s philanthropic arm, in Atlanta yesterday followed Tuesday’s award of $500,000 in total to two Baltimore-based community health centers: Chase Brexton Health Services and People’s Community Health Centers. Baltimore is also producing worrisome statistics, as it fares worse than the rest of the state of Maryland on almost every major health indicator, including heart disease, infant mortality and asthma. Both clinics plan to use the funding to expand access to primary care for residents in the area. Increased access can also help to save taxpayers millions of dollars by deterring people from using emergency rooms as primary care.

In the schools: As part of the Atlanta announcement, Gail Devers, a track and field Olympian and three-time gold medal winner, spoke to students at The New Schools at Carver School of Health Sciences and Research about the BEE Healthy program. Photo: pshone.com.

In addition to the funding, GE volunteer teams are a critical component of the Developing Health program. They work with the health centers to address specific needs, ranging from IT and data analysis to marketing communications and process improvements. The idea is to use the business skills and experience of the GE volunteers to help drive improvements that benefit patients and workflows.

Check the stats: One of the recent data visualization projects launched by GE’s healthymagination team allows users to easily compare indicators of community health across the United States. Click on the image to visit the site. Once there, click on Georgia on the U.S. map and then use the menu bars to compare data.

The Developing Health program is modeled after GE’s successful international program, Developing Health Globally, which spans 14 countries across Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. Both efforts are aligned with GE’s healthymagination business strategy to reduce healthcare costs while simultaneously increasing quality and access. Including Atlanta, the Developing Health program has partnered with 37 non-profit community health centers in eight cities.

As GE Vice Chairman John Rice writes in an opinon piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning, “Good health should be part of everyone’s daily life — not an unreachable luxury.”

* Read the Baltimore announcement
* Read the Atlanta announcement
* Learn more about Developing Health Globally
* Learn more about Developing Health

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “$2M boosts New Orleans’ school-based health centers”
* “Milwaukee clinics upping access with new grants”
* “Developing Health: A clinic grows in Brooklyn”
* “Taking hip-hop health education to Harlem’s Apollo”
* “Responsibility snapshot: 6th Citizenship Report debuts”
* Read more healthymagination stories on GE Reports

Back to school: Developing Health is a 3-year, $25 million, GE program that aims to improve access to primary care in targeted underserved communities across the U.S. The grant announced today will be used to grow enrollment in New Orleans’ school-based health centers and extend those health services to neighboring schools, family members and nearby residents. From left to right at today’s ceremony in New Orleans were Keith Singleton, Kyla Davis, Ronesha Turner and Felica Ennis — all Students at Walter J. Cohen High School.

The idea behind school-based health centers is that they can provide easy access to services for kids who frequently delay treatments or commonly seek emergency room care. With 38,000 students across Orleans Parish alone — with many not having adequate insurance — this grant has the potential to give thousands of students improved access to primary healthcare services.

As the School Health Connection team notes on their website, the health centers are basically doctor’s offices or health clinics located on a school campus and the resulting healthcare services “far exceed what is possible in the typical school nurse program and includes preventive care, comprehensive primary care including acute diagnosis and behavioral health care services.”

For example, the program cites success stories, such as helping students already diagnosed with high blood pressure or diabetes; providing mental health services and substance abuse help for teens who otherwise might not access them; and preventative care, such as the discovery during one sports physical that a 14-year-old student had a previously undiagnosed congenital heart condition.

Healthy attitude: New Orleans is the fifth city after New York, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Louisville to be awarded donations in the program. At today’s ceremony, from left to right, were: State Representative Walt Leger; State Senator Karen Carter-Peterson; Joe Kimbrell, CEO, LPHI; U.S. Congressman Joseph Cao; Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO, GE; Alex Hochron, Assistant Vice Principal, Walter J. Cohen High School; Mayor Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans; Susan Moore, Vice Principal, Walter J. Cohen High School; Al Jones, Principal, Walter J. Cohen High School; and Wanda Anderson-Guillaume, CAO, Recovery School District.

Later today in New Orleans, Jeff Immelt will address a Business Connect luncheon hosted by Ochsner Health System — one of GE’s longtime partners in the area and the subject of our profile yesterday. Among the points he’ll be making about the healthcare space is the need for more “community-wide education on wellness and prevention” — just like in the New Orleans Developing Health project. With Louisiana one of nine states with an obesity prevalence of more than 30 percent, Jeff’s written speech also notes that citizens need “to know more to make smart decisions” for their family’s health and “we need to ensure people get access to the information they need, and that begins with community-wide education programs.” And in the area of hospital efficiency, his written speech urges hospitals around the country to take a page from the work being done at Ochsner and install “industrial quality and process improvement practices” — and metrics to track progress — to “help hospitals ensure that they can operate as efficiently as any business.”

Road work: Ochsner Health System is also extremely active in the region working on preventative care for kids, such as with its I Can Do It! childhood obesity initiative, which includes a customized mobile fitness unit, pictured above. It travels to different at-risk communities and features equipment for strength and cardiovascular workouts, nutrition lectures, and heart-healthy cooking classes.

* Read today’s Developing Health announcement
* Learn about the National Assembly on School-Based Care
* Download a January 2010 study made on Louisiana’s School-Based Health Centers
* Learn more about Developing Health Globally
* Learn more about Developing Health
* Learn more about School Health Connection
* Read about Ochsner’s work to support health initiatives in Jefferson Parrish

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Hurricane hero: Ochsner Health five years after Katrina”
* “Milwaukee clinics upping access with new grants”
* “Developing Health: A clinic grows in Brooklyn”
* “Taking hip-hop health education to Harlem’s Apollo”

Where it counts: Through its Developing Health Globally program, GE is working with 11 hospital projects in Ghana alone. The hospitals are rural facilities serving communities with around 200,000 people — who may live up to a few days’ walk from a hospital.

“Women throughout Africa, where we have worked for more than 35 years, are dying from conditions and complications of child birth that are easily treated in America, Europe and other developed countries,” Leslie writes. “Nearly half a million women across the globe bleed to death after giving birth or perish from infection or die in delivery because trained health care workers aren’t by their side. Some women are more at risk because they live in countries of Africa that have been forgotten: Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire and a dozen other nations have among the highest rates of maternal and infant mortality and lowest life expectancy even though fewer of their citizens are infected with HIV/AIDS.”

Leslie Mancuso, PhD, RN, FAAN, works with front-line health workers to design and implement low-cost, hands-on solutions and services for women and their families.

“The 14 countries in sub-Saharan Africa command neither the attention of policy makers or aid dollars that could change the lives of women and children, secure the future of families and sustain communities. The reasons vary — population, political leadership, language barriers, international oversight. Sadly, the result is the same. When a mother’s health is compromised, the health of her children and family suffer too.”

“A survey by our organization found that the health of residents in the 14 countries is far worse than that of people living in the 29 dominant African countries. As orphaned countries, the 14 receive less than half in per capita U.S. government aid dollars for health programs than do the African countries favored by donors — 86 cents compared to $3.95.”

“Can corporate America help resolve this unacceptable disparity?

“Through its Developing Health Globally project, a commitment to improve hospitals and clinics in 10 African countries, GE has recognized the enormous need on the continent. The health concerns of women and children, however, often begin before they ever enter a hospital. Companies should support programs that promote healthy pregnancies and newborn deliveries, develop low-cost, evidence-based diagnostic and treatment tools for use in countries that have neither the resources or infrastructure to support high-tech systems and train health care practitioners who deliver this much-needed care despite great odds.

“Dr. Blami Dao is one such professional. He is a dean at a medical school in Burkina Faso, one of the 14 orphaned countries. An early participant in Jhpiego-sponsored training in emergency obstetrical care, Dr. Dao used his skills to teach general practitioners in his country to do Caesarean sections. This cross-training enabled many more pregnant women in Burkina Faso to have access to this life-saving procedure. Today, his teaching hospital is affiliated with 30 maternity clinics and more than a dozen countries use it as a training center for physicians. Supporting a master trainer like Dr. Dao is an investment that pays life-saving dividends and reaches across borders….”

Baby talk: In February, the GE Foundation began working with Ashoka, the global network of leading social entrepreneurs, to identify and map solutions aimed at improving maternal and infant health around the world.

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Robert Harrison on China’s EHS Academy: Scale is key”
* “Responsibility snapshot: 6th Citizenship Report debuts”
* “Citizen GE: Linking sustainability to public trust”
* “Healthcare in Africa: A closer look at Ghana”
* “Making an impact: GE’s medical aid in Abeche, Chad”
* “Helping 101 babies & counting in Cambodia’s hospitals”
* “Making rural healthcare exponentially more effective”
* “Hey baby! GE donates $8M for UK maternal hospital”

* View the Citizenship Report and the re-launched website at ge.com/citizenship
* Read Leslie’s comments during last May’s healthymagination conference
* Learn more about the Developing Health Globally program

A ripple effect: The first EHS Academy was launched late last year and is based at Sun Yat-sen University’s Lingnan College, a respected business school in the southern city of Guangzhou. Drawing on best practices from companies such as GE, Honeywell, Walmart and Adidas, the goal is to support the growth of a Chinese EHS profession that will boost compliance in factories, rein in energy use and encourage conversion to cleaner energy. Lead funding has been provided by GE, the U.S. Agency for International Development and Walmart.

In his essay, “Developing strong local and international partnerships,” Robert writes that one of the reasons his organization likes the academy so much is because the project “fills a gap.” He continues: “We could see the enormous potential for the EHS Academy model to fill a distinct need in China, which is currently the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. The pace of supply chain expansion has outpaced even traditional EHS compliance efforts, and a systematic approach to monitoring greenhouse gas emissions throughout supply chains did not exist. A comprehensive, sustainable approach, with the potential to get to scale quickly, was needed.”

Robert S. Harrison is also chairman of the board of directors of the Henry Street Settlement, vice-chairman of the board of trustees of Cornell University, and a member of the board of directors of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars.

“The Academy is an innovative partnership because it combines the relative strengths of governments, local partners, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, and multi-national corporations,” he writes. “It’s crucial for all these different types of organizations to collaborate to address the challenges of Chinese supply chains….”

“In China, scale is key. ISC’s [Academy backer Institute for Sustainable Communities’] corporate partners are absolutely integral to ensuring that meaningful scale is reached. By committing to send their own managers to the trainings, they can continue to test and refine the Academy’s impacts. And as success is demonstrated, they can expand the trainings to the supply chain managers throughout their operations. With prominent industry leaders like GE, Walmart and Adidas involved, the chances of rapid widespread adoption are much improved.

“Beyond that, the Academy model is unique for its investment in leadership training, not just compliance training. Managers coming out of their training will be positioned to be real agents of change, and to address the challenges presented by the existing patchwork approach to EHS and energy management in China….”

As Robert notes, “scale is already happening” with the next Academy in Jiangsu expected to train 4,000 managers per year. “The long-term aim is to change policy and practice across Chinese industry … and the EHS Academy seems to hit all the right notes — by rooting itself in Chinese academic institutions, garnering the support of key government agencies, and involving its main stakeholders in the funding and operations of the program.”

The Citizenship website also features a Q&A with Yu Yang, EHS Manager with Fortune Electric Ltd., a Chinese supplier, who attended the EHS Academy.

* Read Robert’s full post
* Read a feature story about the EHS Academy on the Citizenship website
* Read “China charts green goals with new partnership” on GE Reports
* Read “Responsibility snapshot: 6th Citizenship Report debuts” on GE Reports
* View the Citizenship Report and the re-launched website at ge.com/citizenship
* Read “Citizen GE: Linking sustainability to public trust” on GE Reports