GE Shares Skills, Intellectual Capital with CommonBond Communities
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.--GE Capital Solutions today announced a unique community outreach program called In the Community, For the Community (ICFC) to help non-profit providers improve the management capacity needed to fulfill their missions. This effort debuted at GE locations in St. Paul and Minneapolis as well as Danbury, Connecticut, Scottsdale, Arizona and Sydney, Australia.
ICFC combines traditional forms of giving such as community volunteerism and financial support with GE best practice sharing. It comes at a time when non-profits increasingly are challenged to enhance operations on shoestring budgets, hire and retain talented people and drive change.
A trial ICFC program recently was initiated with St. Paul-based CommonBond Communities, the region’s largest non-profit provider of affordable housing with services, to help them enhance after school programming and community outreach.
A GE employee who is also a Six Sigma black belt led CommonBond’s development and program leaders through a WorkOut™ session that focused on helping the organization build its community engagement capacity. WorkOut is an approach GE developed to empower employees to improve processes, identify new ideas and open communications and dialogue between functions within an organization.
“We used the tools immediately,” says Deb Sakry Lande, CommonBond’s Director of Community Relations. “It helped us visualize what success would look like and gave us techniques for making it happen. Training like this is a luxury for nonprofits that has a lasting effect on our organization’s sustainability.”
“Both for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations face many of the same operational and organizational challenges,” says Kristi Rollag Wangstad, Vice President, Public Affairs, GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services, which is part of GE Capital Solutions. “Opening the GE tool box and sharing best practices we use to manage and grow our business is something we do with our customers through GE’s unique At the Customer, For the Customer program. So adding this additional layer of investment, our intellectual capital, to our community outreach efforts makes a lot of sense.”
In addition to the WorkOut session, nearly 400 employees devoted more than 1,500 hours to improve 12 CommonBond sites in June during GE Global Community Days. GE also supported CommonBond with a $33,000 contribution to help develop a new pilot program for teenagers to grow their academic and leadership skills.
About GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services
GE Commercial Finance Fleet Services, based in Eden Prairie, Minn., is a global fleet management company with operations in the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Fleet is part of GE Capital Solutions, which provides leasing, lending, and capital investment products and services to help business customers grow. GE is Imagination at Work — a diversified technology, media and financial services company focused on solving some of the world's toughest problems. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.gefleet.com.
About CommonBond Communities
CommonBond Communities is the largest nonprofit provider of affordable homes with on-site resident services in the Upper Midwest. CommonBond Communities’ 67 apartment and townhome communities serve more than 6,000 people including working families with children, seniors and people with special needs. CommonBond’s 4,000 homes are located in 35 regional municipalities. CommonBond Communities has earned a national reputation for excellence in developing and managing quality affordable housing while providing customized resident services administered through Advantage Centers that promote resident success. For more information, visit www.commonbond.org