Bill Leahy’s family has been in Connecticut for generations, and — like him — many served in the military and worked in manufacturing.
He’s acutely aware of the immense challenge the transition from military to civilian life can be for service members. Four years ago, his older brother, Sean, died by suicide after more than 15 years of service in the Marines.
“The military, they invest millions of dollars to turn you into a war fighter in the beginning, right? They’re undoing all the civilian stuff,” Leahy said. “And then on the back end, it’s ‘Thank you for your service, good luck, and we hope it works out well for you.’ And that’s about it.”
The tragedy led Leahy to found Unturning Steel, a nonprofit that helps members of the military navigate the transition. The organization connects service members to career opportunities in manufacturing, offering internships and job placement in several states, including Tennessee, Texas and Illinois.
Leahy is especially focused on establishing the organization in his home state.
“There’s an opportunity to change the direction of Connecticut and make it more attractive to veterans,” he said. “We can’t compete on taxes, but what we can compete on is opportunity and community.”
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Connecticut needs skilled workers, particularly in its manufacturing sector, much of which is devoted to building military submarines and aircraft and component parts. But Leahy said he’s been frustrated in his efforts to get funding from the state for Unturning Steel.
The problem isn’t a lack of veteran-focused support. Connecticut offers many programs through the state’s Military Department, Department of Veterans Affairs and other agencies that provide wraparound services, ranging from housing to healthcare and job support. Several agencies help promote and share employment resources, though job services are primarily led by the Connecticut Department of Labor.
In interviews with The Connecticut Mirror, state officials outlined their efforts to assist service members returning to civilian life in a host of areas. They said various state agencies are refining programs and outreach to veterans, while trying to be flexible enough to address the wide variety of needs.
“We want there to be no wrong door,” said Juliet Manalan, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Labor, which helps connect veterans to job resources through American Job Centers and administering federal programs. “They don’t have to go try to track down all the individual services.”
And program leaders across departments said they have offered to help Leahy make connections and get the word out about his program. Two years ago, Leahy worked with Connecticut’s then-Chief Manufacturing Officer Paul Lavoie, discussing ways the state could help support the organization, even joining Lavoie in a media interview about connecting veterans to manufacturing jobs.
But what Leahy said he really needs — money — is more complicated to obtain. Learning the web of state agencies, trying to give presentations or schedule meetings with a patchwork of offices, only to be told public funds aren’t available or referred to a different agency has left him questioning whether Connecticut will be able to help Unturning Steel fulfill its mission.
Leahy said the organization doesn’t need much to keep its efforts going in Connecticut — less than $400,000 a year by his account. But public funds are subject to rules, and at some point, it started feeling like an obstacle course.
State Rep. Jaime Foster, D-Ellington, who co-chairs the General Assembly’s Committee on Veterans’ and Military Affairs, acknowledged the frustration programs like Leahy’s can face and the difficulties navigating the state veteran support network.
“I think oftentimes when too many hands are in the pot, there’s no one really stirring the pot,” she said.
Turning steel
Military service and manufacturing are perhaps the two biggest constants for the Leahy family.
Leahy’s grandfather served in the Marine Corps and in the Korean War, and his father was a Naval Academy graduate, serving in the Marines before launching a manufacturing career. His older sister spent years in the Army, and Leahy’s older brother, Sean, was part of the family’s third generation of USMC service.
Leahy, himself, entered the manufacturing industry after serving in the Army. Even years removed from his service, Leahy still looks like a soldier, albeit one with an out-of-regulation beard.
A talented hockey player, Leahy was recruited for the team at West Point, and he studied engineering at the military academy. After his time as a cadet, he was commissioned as an officer in the Army in 2009, where he served as an infantry platoon leader. For the most part, he says, his military career was largely uneventful.
By the mid-2010s, he had married, was discharged and was seeking the next step in his career. He was also looking for a deeper sense of purpose.
At times, that search was challenging. In the military, “there’s 100 people available to you at any second that have done your job already, that are mentoring you,” he said. “It’s so simple, and it’s by design, and it’s fantastic. I was making the assumption that that same kind of support and training would be available on the civilian side.”
“It wasn’t,” he said.
Bill Leahy’s father, Tom Leahy, served as part of the family’s second generation of Marines. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Leahy
Bill Leahy played hockey for West Point, later graduating in 2009. He still coaches younger athletes. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Leahy
This photo of Sean Leahy’s military vehicle, damaged by an explosive device while in Afghanistan, inspired the name Unturning Steel. Credit: Courtesy of Bill Leahy
Leahy’s search led him to Weyerhaeuser, a wood products manufacturing company. After some time, he thrived in the work, beginning a second act as a reliability engineer and later opening his own engineering consulting service.
But the shadows of his time in the military still lingered, including stress and other mental health issues. And there were other reminders, too.
The youngest of five siblings, Leahy looked up to his brother Sean in particular. Sean entered service before Leahy, opting for the Marines like his father and grandfather before him. Sean served as a platoon commander, completing tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sean Leahy was a natural leader and did best in situations where he worked with others. He loved to mentor younger officers, and his unit, he would say, was like an extension of his family.
But by the time Sean was discharged in the early 2020s, the roles between the brothers had shifted. The younger Leahy found himself playing a support role as his brother navigated life after service. He did what he could to connect Sean to potential manufacturing jobs.
Sean’s death was painful, Leahy said. But at his funeral, the family was given a photo that sparked the idea behind Unturning Steel.
In it, one of the armored vehicles Sean traveled in during his time in Afghanistan can be seen, torn apart by a roadside bomb. The image called to mind something Leahy heard from a Navy SEAL who was a friend of Sean’s: the phrase, “turning steel.”
Members in some units call out “Turning steel!” to initiate a breach action that requires explosives demolition work. It’s heard as a call for soldiers to set their minds and actions to the difficult task at hand, operating as a single unit, rather than individuals.
That clarified to Leahy what he needed to do. His organization’s name, Unturning Steel, implies the reversal of a destructive action, he said.
“It became a representation of how one might feel after the military,” he said. “The consequences of service are there, and they’re evident. Our mission is to restore people to function, because that’s what we do in manufacturing: maintain function.”
Success stories
Leahy’s work connecting people to manufacturing careers began in 2022, when he started a pilot program to train people for jobs in the industry. In 2024, he turned that idea into Unturning Steel, a nonprofit focused on helping veterans.
The nonprofit has three closely linked goals: expanding support networks to service members by building a community that can endure after their military careers; creating pipelines in the manufacturing industry to help people find jobs in the civilian workforce; and fighting against veteran suicide, an issue that affects thousands of veterans each year, many of them disconnected from services or community support.
The organization tries to connect with service members before they leave active duty. In many cases, participants are brought into the fold while they’re taking part in the Department of Defense’s SkillBridge program, an initiative where service members can continue earning a salary from the military as they work as an intern, apprentice or paid trainee for jobs in the civilian workforce.
Unturning Steel currently works as a SkillBridge provider, connecting service members who enter the program to manufacturers in several states. But for Leahy, a native of Connecticut, helping service members from — or looking to live in — his home state is a key priority.
“My ultimate goal is to create a national model here in Connecticut,” he said.
Maya Amaker, another Connecticut native and recently-discharged Army master sergeant, recently returned home to the New Britain area to be closer to family after 24 years of service. The transition has felt complicated at times.
When she tried to connect with SkillBridge programs, she said, few responded to her inquiries. In the military, Amaker had managed logistics, and she developed the kind of skills she thought would be in high demand. But the professional opportunities she’s found since returning to Connecticut haven’t offered her the kind of money she thought she deserved, and one offer that seemed to be a good fit turned out to be a scam.
Unturning Steel was the only group that responded to her inquiries through SkillBridge, and she said working with Leahy has helped. He supported her as she dealt with the employment scam, and over the summer she worked at a local manufacturing company. She’s now working full time while helping Leahy and his wife to provide administrative and other support for Unturning Steel.
“It’s been refreshing to see somebody who really wants to give back, who understands it,” she said. “It’s just been a good experience.”
To date, Unturning Steel has put some 20 participants through its training program, the majority have been veterans or transitioning service members.
Leahy likes to boast about the participants. There’s the trainee who’s learning to weld at Lincoln Tech, taking the first step towards an engineering career. There’s the former trainee who is starting his own manufacturing company. And there’s an aspiring entrepreneur who started as a trainee but eventually admitted his real passion was making pickled foods, a practice he had refined during late nights in the barracks. The nonprofit went on to support his pickle business.
Leahy says he wants to provide whatever help he can, but he needs more money to do it. He estimated he’s spent upwards of six figures of his own money getting Unturning Steel running, using the cash to help participants secure temporary housing or cover trainee’s certification fees. He has also sought out sponsorships with manufacturing companies, as well as grants and other fundraising.
“We’re really looking for businesses in the manufacturing realm that not only have a philanthropic arm but also potential job opportunities for the veterans within our programming,” said Kevin Cassesse, Unturning Steel’s vice president for business development.
Leahy said Unturning Steel currently does not have enough money to run another Connecticut-based cohort. As it tries to secure more funding, it will continue its programming in states like Tennessee where it works closely with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Reliability and Maintainability Center and has broader support and more connections with manufacturers.
But Connecticut is where Leahy wants to start training cohorts on a more consistent basis.
Legislative action
State lawmakers have been considering ways to better coordinate local support for veterans entering the workforce.
Earlier this year, the Committee on Veterans’ and Military Affairs held a “Troops to Trades” forum, an event where a range of speakers — including local unions, manufacturing groups and nonprofit veteran support organizations — described their work and how it fits into broader efforts around the state.
Both Leahy and Jim King, an Army veteran who serves as the board chair of Unturning Steel, spoke at the forum, calling attention to the need for additional state support for veterans and active duty service members.
Members of the committee said the event offered helpful insights, but more than that, it showed that the state’s efforts to support veterans had created silos that needed to change.
The committee later advanced House Bill 5409, legislation that aimed to improve coordination between state agencies serving veterans or active duty service members. The bill tasked agencies with coordinating and promoting a job fair for veterans and also required the Labor Department to create an informational landing page listing the state’s veteran support resources in one place.
The bill also called on the state Department of Economic and Community Development to create legislative recommendations for more things that can be done to support veteran workers in the state, and it proposed a tax credit that companies could claim if they created new positions and filled them with veterans.
“We have to be able to connect the employers directly to those veterans,” said Rep. Hubert Delany, D-Stamford, the committee’s vice chair. “And this starts that process.”
But Delany, an Army veteran who recently finished a decade of service as a military journalist, acknowledged the bill was far from the only change needed.
H.B. 5409 didn’t come up for a vote in the House, but several elements of it — including the state coordination aspect, the job fair, the CTDOL information page and a request for legislative recommendations from DECD — were rolled into omnibus labor legislation that passed in May.
Funding opportunities for veteran and military-focused nonprofits, a key need of Leahy’s, were left out. Members of the committee said attaching money to the original legislation might have made its passage more complicated, and being rolled into a larger bill made streamlining their ask even more necessary.
“Providing funding to nonprofits is certainly a valid way to move this initiative forward,” said committee chair Sen. Paul Honig, D-Harwinton. “But when there’s funding involved, it makes it a lot harder to get in the budgeting process.”
In response to inquiries from CT Mirror, several agencies, including the Office of Workforce Strategy and the Department of Labor, confirmed that they are in contact with Unturning Steel or have been in the past. But the offices said most of those discussions were at an early stage — largely focused on helping the organization make connections or share resources — and stopped far short of any guarantee of funding.
“Several Office of Workforce Strategy (OWS) staff have had discussions with Unturning Steel over the last few years,” Kelli-Marie Vallieres, the state’s chief workforce officer, said in a statement. She added that the office shared several state resources with the organization and also invited Unturning Steel to present at a November 2024 meeting for the Governor’s Workforce Council’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access Committee.
But the organization missed out on a chance for funding: A key state workforce development initiative launched before OWS and Unturning Steel were connected.
The state’s Office of Manufacturing, meanwhile, said despite Lavoie’s full-throated support of Unturning Steel in 2024, the nonprofit never entered into any formal discussions about money with the agency, which manages the state’s $130 million Manufacturing Innovation Fund. (Leahy disputes the agency’s claim that no discussions occurred.)
The state’s Chief Manufacturing Officer is now Kirti Patel. Lavoie departed in 2025 for a role at the University of New Haven. In an emailed statement, Michelle Hall, director of the Office of Manufacturing, said Unturning Steel “has not yet submitted a formal funding request.”
“The Office welcomes concepts and proposals that align with the State’s manufacturing priorities and support the continued growth and competitiveness of Connecticut’s manufacturing sector,” she added.
Leahy and Cassesse said they haven’t given up, and their efforts to engage with the state are ongoing. Discussions have started and stopped with various offices, at times pausing for an extended period before picking back up.
Filling a need
Programs like Unturning Steel are designed to help not only returning veterans but also the businesses that keep Connecticut’s economy humming.
The state currently has more than 86,000 job openings, and “almost 8,000 of them are in manufacturing,” said Chris Davis, the vice president of public policy for the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, the state’s largest trade group. “Employers across the state are desperately looking for workers that could fill those positions.”
General Dynamics Electric Boat, the submarine powerhouse based in Groton, is ramping up after winning several major contracts with the U.S. Navy. By the end of 2026, the company needs to hire some 8,000 skilled workers. Sean Morrone, Electric Boat’s manager of workforce development, has said that hiring more veterans is particularly important.
“This is critical for national development. The Navy needs us to be successful,” Morrone said. “The Navy needs us to hire all the people so we can build boats faster.”
In early September, CT Mirror visited Eljen Corp., a Windsor-based manufacturer that has long supported veterans in the state, including recently in partnership with Unturning Steel. Leahy has worked to help the company train program participants on new equipment as part of their internships. Jim King, the president of Eljen Corp., also serves on the nonprofit’s board.
Amaker was there, as was Jacob Soto, the transitioning Marine who is learning welding at Lincoln Tech.
Having recently returned to Hartford after a stint as an artillery fire direction controller in the Marine Corps, Soto said the program is helping him figure out his next steps. Leahy is working with him to develop skills to work as a welder or reliability engineer. Amaker has also become a support figure, checking in with Soto regularly and providing advice.
After leaving the Marines, finding Unturning Steel “was a blessing,” Soto said. “It’s a good feeling knowing that you have support somewhere, especially when you thought you had nothing to go back to.”
As the visit came to a close, Leahy chatted with Amaker and Soto about an upcoming remembrance hike, a chance for local veterans to come together. It’s an example of the broader veteran community Leahy wants to help cultivate.
“To make this what it needs to be in Connecticut, it needs to be supported,” Leahy said.
Eljen’s King said it fills a critical need.
“The moment that you connect with other veterans, you’re all of a sudden going to find resources. You’re going to find out what’s worked for the other guys, what didn’t work,” King said. “That’s what is more powerful than just going to the VA.”