GE Lighting is celebrating 100 years
at its Nela Park headquarters in East Cleveland with a huge donation.
The GE Foundation has donated
$500,000 to two Northeast Ohio nonprofit health centers: The Neighborhood
Family Practice and Northeast Ohio Neighborhood Health Services. Each received a check for $250,000.
The grants are part of the GE
Foundation’s Developing Health program, with a goal of increasing access to
healthcare in underserved communities. These grants increase the GE
Foundation’s total footprint to 33 U.S. cities and more than 100 nonprofit
community health centers
The $250,000 donation to NFP will
help support the expansion of its integrated behavioral health offering to
Cleveland’s West Side community. For NEON, the grant will help fund the
organization’s Patient Navigator Services Program, which is designed to
increase access to healthcare for patients with diabetes and provide financial
counseling. Specifically, NEON plans to use the funds to hire a case manager
and facilitate the program. The GE Foundation’s Developing Health U.S. and
Developing Health Globally programs have positively impacted the health of more
than 14 million people around the world.
In addition to the donations to NFP
and NEON, the Nela Park centennial celebration offered more than 100 guests and
hundreds of Nela Park employees the opportunity to reflect on the rich history
of the nation’s first industrial park‹and to look toward the future of
lighting.
“As the lighting industry
continues its rapid transformation, it’s important to reflect on the
accomplishments of those who came before us,” said Maryrose Sylvester,
president and CEO, GE Lighting. “We value the opportunity to learn from
the experiences and genius of inventors like GE’s founder, Thomas Edison, and
GE scientists like LED inventor Nick Holonyak and Nela Park’s recently retired
Lou Nerone, whose more than 100 patents improved the performance of GE’s
fluorescent lighting systems.”
Sylvester added, “For every
well told story of GE greatness, there are thousands of significant
accomplishments and discoveries that are dutifully saving customers billions of
dollars in energy and maintenance costs every year. We’re innovating for
customers because when they’re successful, we’re successful.”
Sylvester, invited guests and
hundreds of Nela Park employees also took time to inaugurate the GE Museum of
Lighting Innovation, an educational resource now accessible to the more than
4,000 commercial customers who visit Nela Park each year.
Earlier in the day, GE employees
gathered to witness the unearthing of a nearly 100-year-old time capsule and
the burial of a new one. The time capsule from 1916 included some of the first
bulbs developed at Nela Park, original blue prints of Nela Park and engineering
documents and photographs. The newly buried time capsule contained
energy-efficient bulbs of today, including GE’s energy smart® LED and CFL bulbs and
historical artifacts, such as some of the first GE Mazda bulbs sold for general
home lighting and Nela Park history books.
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