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n FEATURE STORY

Why ‘citizenship’ best fits Boeing’s role in supporting communities

By susan Birkholtz

When Boeing vice president Anne Roosevelt talks about the place of business in society, she uses the term “citi-zenship”—specifically, global corporate citizenship—

rather than any other term. This makes sense, since not long ago Roosevelt led the change

of the function’s name from Community and Education Rela-tions—which she said did not fully capture the potential of the function’s role in the company—to Global Corporate Citizenship.

Achieving ‘great things’

Roosevelt said the role of Boeing’s GCC function is to align and integrate the diverse interests, motivations and resources of Boeing’s stakeholders.

“Societies and businesses are interdependent for long-term vi-ability. Considering the global issues of climate change, the threat of terrorism and immigration, the imperative for alignment and in-tegration among internal and external stakeholders is extreme, and we can play a key role,” Roosevelt said.

“Boeing has unique skills, including our ability to be inno-vative and bring many different people and elements together to achieve a common goal. By applying these skills to improving our communities, we can achieve great things that benefit everyone,” she said.

Roosevelt’s aim for GCC is to be a facilitator of community change, not simply a source of community funding. “To us, the en-

In this 2006 image, employees of Depaul Health Center in St. Louis recreate a day of patient flow-through using a model of the facility’s emergency department. Boeing employees helped Depaul improve its Lean practices.

DAve MArtin photo

September 2007 BOEING FRONTIERS�0

ergy and creativity we inspire in our community partners to solve problems collectively should be more important than the size of our check,” she added.

To that end, Roosevelt wants to move the function from an input mentality to an outpoint mentality—considering not the money donated or hours volunteered, but what societal out-comes it expects to influence.

“Our vision is to be to be a global corporate leader, working in concert with others to shape a world where individuals can thrive and every community is a vibrant place to live,” Roosevelt said. To accomplish this vision, we invest a portfolio of resources—of which cash is just one part—to motivate, educate and assist our community partners in creating positive change that has lasting community impact.”

MORE THAN FUNDINGAlthough philanthropy—in the form of strategic cash grants—

is a viable tool to improve communities, for Roosevelt, citizenship is not about how much money a corporation distributes charita-bly. Rather, citizenship is reflected in how a corporation affects

the world in every dimension in which it operates—including the physical, social and economic realms.

Employees play a key role in citizenship, Roosevelt said. “Our employees are an integral means by which we live out our

role as a global corporate citizen, and complement what we contrib-ute to our communities on a corporate basis,” she said. “All of us have the opportunity to demonstrate global corporate citizenship, both inside the company as well as outside the company, as we in-teract with our suppliers, customers and community members.”

Roosevelt cited several instances of employees volunteering in their communities, using the skills they have learned at Boeing. Among them: An F/A-18 team helped a St. Louis hospital trans-form its emergency room procedures, cutting wait times for non-critical visits from four or five hours to about 90 minutes (see page 31 of the February 2006 Boeing Frontiers).

“This wasn’t a GCC-organized project, and it received no fund-ing from Boeing. A group of employees just saw a need and figured out how they could help. That’s true citizenship,” Roosevelt said.

“Our collective challenge as a company is to find ways to fa-cilitate in a more structured way the application of our employees’ skills and experience to help improve society in partnership with community organizations,” she continued. “Just think of the good we could achieve if the skills, experience, dedication and innova-tion of our employees were put to work helping our communities solve problems. That would be worth so much more than Boeing would be able to give in any financial way.

“I encourage our employees to start thinking of ways, as the St. Louis team did, to use their unique capabilities to contribute to Boeing’s global corporate citizenship and improve our world,” Roosevelt said.

Citizenship, then, is expressed in how a corporation and its em-ployees carry out its business, both internally and externally, she said, in partnership and collaboration with society.

“I believe that citizenship is part and parcel of what a company is and how it acts—not an adjunct,” she continued. “For example, at Boeing, global corporate citizenship is much more than simply the name of a department or function. It is listed among the core values of the company, as stated in Vision 2016 (the company’s mission statement). Communities also are included among our key groups of stakeholders in our Boeing Management Model, which guides how we operate as a company.”

When one suggests that corporate “citizenship” is just another way of saying corporate social responsibility, Roosevelt respect-fully disagrees. “I believe that corporate social responsibility is an output or expression of citizenship, rather than citizenship itself. Similarly, ‘sustainability’ is a logical extension of citizenship,” she said. “Citizenship is the core identity—the DNA from which all positive action and interaction by a corporation springs, wheth-er one calls those actions corporate social responsibility or some-thing else.”

For Roosevelt, citizenship is not a static thing that can be de-scribed exactly. “Citizenship continually evolves as society and its needs evolve. Its definition lies in our response to those needs. It calls us all equally to get engaged, to bring our skills and talents—our best selves—to our efforts, both large and small,” she said.

INTEGRAL TO THE BUSINESSRoosevelt believes it’s imperative for those who lead corporate

citizenship activities to continually build and demonstrate commu-nity partnerships that are as integral to the continued success of the company as the relationships it builds with its business partners.

n FEATURE STORY

Anne Roosevelt, vice president, Global Corporate Citizenship, said the mission of the function she leads is to align and integrate the diverse interests, motivations and resources of Boeing’s stakeholders.

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“We can achieve this by aligning our activities in the com-munity with the competencies of the business in order to create a corporate entity able to address social change issues effectively,” Roosevelt said. “Meeting societal needs and business success are complementary goals. The premise is that if citizenship and busi-ness performance are equally integral to a company’s mission, rep-utation and long-term viability will take care of themselves.”

Roosevelt said corporations must align their unconnected “socially responsible” activities with their business. “From there they can move on to integrate these values into our key business decisions and long-term strategic planning,” she said.

“Today, much more is expected of business that ever before—to work in partnership with our communities along with our other key stakeholders, using our core competencies and financial suc-cess to make the world and our collective futures secure; to answer the call of citizenship and become true leaders of social change,” she continued.

According to Roosevelt, true corporate citizens lead by em-powering others to take control of their own lives and helping them to solve their own problems. “That is 21st century leader-ship,” she said. “And that’s what citizenship is—it is ongoing part-nership, striving to do what is right, helping each other, respect-ing that which is unfamiliar to us, and enabling health and human dignity with the confidence that we can indeed live in a world of peace.” n

susan.l.birkholtz@boeing.com

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New GCC Corporate Team completeThe new Boeing Global Corporate Citizen-ship corporate team, led by Anne Roosevelt, GCC vice president, includes both GCC staff and adjunct members from other areas of the business, who are providing valuable perspective to GCC-related issues.

The team, shown here, includes

Seated, from left: Patrice Mingo, GCC direc-tor, Strategic Programs; Joyce Walters, GCC specialist, Education; Anne Roosevelt, GCC vice president; Cheryl Cooke, GCC specialist, Civic and Environment; Veronica Cavallaro, GCC specialist, Research and Measurement.

Standing, from left: Peter Hoffman, Phan-tom Works; Naomi Anderson, GCC special-ist, Global Network Engagement; Gordon McHenry, director, Commercial Airplanes Global Corporate Citizenship; Michele Thomas, GCC office assistant; Kelli Johnson, GCC office assistant; Danielle Thomas, GCC executive assistant; Herbert Lust, director, Strategy Integra-tion; Angel Ysaguirre, GCC specialist, Arts and Culture and Health and Human Services; Paulina Bendaña, Boeing International; Bridget Sweeney, GCC director, Business Operations; and Joanne Huggard, director, Integrated Defense Systems Global Corporate Citizenship.

For team member bios, visit http://community.web.boeing.com/corp_team/team.cfm on the Boeing intranet.

Boeing’s Norma Clayton (upper left) and Adam Burkey (sitting) took part in a recent site investigation of Hurricane Katrina–affected areas of New orleans and mississippi, to see how support from Boeing and its employees was helping people. Among their stops: a visit with a family living in a government-provided trailer in mississippi. Seven people live in the trailer, five of whom are pic-tured here, while they wait for more permanent housing.

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