If you, like many business leaders, want to make a positive difference in your community, you have likely encountered the barriers that make doing so difficult. You and your employees, while experts within your domain, may have limited knowledge of and relationships with the complex ecosystem of public, nonprofit, and private sector actors. Moreover, power and trust dynamics make it difficult to form meaningful partnerships with the people you hope to engage with, especially those with direct lived experience on the issues. To ensure your efforts have positive outcomes for the community, you first need to overcome these barriers by cultivating your employees’ civic leadership - their knowledge of local systems and issues, their skills to engage across differences, and their relationships with the community.
GenUnity helps employers close this divide by creating opportunities for their employees to engage with the communities they hope to serve and learn how to address the inequities that these residents face. By convening a diverse, dynamic cross-section of the community, we provide the space, tools, and resources they need to build authentic relationships, integrate their collective experiences, and build the capacity to drive change. Employees not only bring back new ideas for social impact but the skills to strengthen company culture and the relationships that enable the long-term collaboration our communities need.
Health insurance provider Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (Blue Cross) has partnered with GenUnity since 2020 to offer its employees the opportunity to deepen purpose, create connections, and drive change within both the company and in their communities.
The steward of this partnership is Brianne “Brie” Tangney, a member of Blue Cross’s corporate citizenship team, who oversees the company’s signature initiatives and civic leadership development programs.
When Brie first heard about GenUnity, Blue Cross didn’t have an external civic leadership development program and they had to do things in-house. What set GenUnity apart from other similar programs was the diversity of its participants and access to communities and the challenges they face.
“The GenUnity model and how it brings together folks from all different life experiences is really unique and something that we didn’t have within our current portfolio of programming,” she shares.
Since 2020, over 10 Blue Cross employees have participated in GenUnity’s Housing and Health Equity programs, and Blue Cross has witnessed firsthand how engaging with their diverse community builds employees’ capacity to drive change — both at Blue Cross and in the community — on key social issues.
Community-Building for Social Good
GenUnity believes in the transformational potential of everyday people working together to build better communities. Connecting a diverse community, with its range of perspectives, gives employees a deeper understanding of the issues — and what it takes to drive change.
“We saw a very unique opportunity to engage our colleagues,” Brie says about their decision to partner with GenUnity.
One of those colleagues was Christina Bryant, a Senior Manager of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Belonging at Blue Cross. Christina took part in the 2023 Health Equity Cohort, where she connected with a diverse community — from patients and grassroots advocacy groups to leaders at community health centres and in government — in ways she doesn’t usually get to do in her day-to-day work.
Christina says the experience gave her a deeper understanding of the issues she hoped to address in her work. “[GenUnity] brings together such a diverse group of lived expertise, whether personally or professionally. It was very grounding to hear from people who may have experienced their own treatment of inequities or understand how the system is deeply intertwined,” she says.
Participating in the Health Equity program was a natural next step for Alex Connor, an Innovation Consultant on Blue Cross’s Innovation team who joined the 2022 Health Equity cohort. Alex was already active in the health equity space, so Brie immediately thought of him.
Alex appreciated GenUnity’s broad and inclusive focus because it allowed him to think about the government’s vantage point and understand how healthcare policy affects the larger community in deep and lasting ways.
“We really took a deeper lens focusing on the people, institutions, and other areas that influence the community,” he explains.
Alex’s partnership with GenUnity didn’t stop when his cohort’s program ended. He was so compelled by the programming GenUnity was offering — which he describes as “phenomenal” — and the impact it was having that he became a facilitator in the 2023 cohort.
A Brave, Safe Space for Dialogue and Exploration
GenUnity is building “A Community By Everyone, For Everyone,” and this starts by
creating a brave, safe space where everyone can come together, contribute, and explore solutions.
“There were a lot of people who wanted to just vent, and there was room for that,” says Michele Enright, an Exception Review Specialist at Blue Cross who participated in the 2023 GenUnity Health Equity Cohort.
Michele appreciated that the facilitators met participants where they were at, making the program a safe space for people to show up as themselves — they could reflect, process emotions, or simply be quiet. “There were times when there was silence — and they welcomed that,” she adds.
Christina also discovered the value of holding respectful conversations with people whose views differ from hers. “Difficult conversations are really not that difficult when you make space to have them,” she explains. The brave, safe
spaces GenUnity fosters gave her the confidence to tackle difficult conversations and find ways to address community issues.
When Brie connected with some of the program participants, one of the things that stood out to her was the brave space that GenUnity provides for people from all walks of life to self-examine and explore their role in their community’s social issues.
“One colleague shared with me she always knew she had privilege, but she had never had an experience that really pushed her to look at that privilege and examine it in such a close and deep way,” she says.
Helping Employees Develop a Growth Mindset
GenUnity believes everyday residents can make an impact in their communities by advancing justice in both their professional and personal lives. But they need support to cultivate this capacity, which is why GenUnity centres a growth mindset at the heart of its programs.
It’s easy to feel dis-empowered when faced with the enormity of the challenges that threaten communities, especially when progress feels unpredictable or inconsistent. For instance, when the Supreme Court eliminated affirmative action or overturned Roe vs. Wade — it can feel, as Christina puts it, “like the race has no finish line.”
However, GenUnity allowed her to develop a growth mindset that has helped her focus on what can be done. “Programs like GenUnity make the race feel more like a relay. And I know that I can pass things on, and the work will keep going,” she explains.
Michele wasn’t sure what to expect when she joined the cohort, but the thought-provoking content taught her the importance of taking the time to listen when engaging with communities.
“When I see something wrong, I want to fix it. But you can’t always have a fix, and you just need to listen. We just need to take the time to listen and not judge,” she says.
Alex exemplifies this growth mindset and long-term commitment to impact for Brie. His continued engagement with GenUnity as a facilitator demonstrates both his dedication to lifelong learning as well as the program’s potential for long-term impact. .
“[Alex’s experience with GenUnity] really speaks to this lifetime community of practice that GenUnity is building [...] to keep folks connected and engaged beyond their cohort experience,” Brie says.
GenUnity Helps Employees Make a Difference
Feeling unable to affect urgent issues is frustrating. Through GenUnity, members navigate the complexity of change to discover their own unique capacity to make an impact.
For Christina, newfound community became a new source of motivation and accountability. She shares, “The conversations really provided me with hope. And I hope that health equity will continue to progress because there are so many people working passionately towards just change.”
Michele reinforced the importance of resisting wide-ranging assumptions and taking care to understand individual stories in her work and community engagement. “Everyone’s background brings something to their present-day life,” she says.
To Alex, GenUnity’s impact was profound and has directly shaped his current work on the Innovation team closing gaps in access to culturally competent behavioural healthcare. “It was completely life-changing and [will] inform the way I do my work going forward and how it impacts others,” he says.
GenUnity’s programs also aren’t “one-and-done” — they support members to make a difference in their workplace and community, even after completing the program. Brie loves that participants can continue accessing resources and building relationships through GenUnity’s Lifetime Community - an initiative Blue Cross is supporting for over the next several years.
A Transformational Partnership
Through GenUnity’s Health Equity program, Christina, Michele, and Alex experienced a transformation — individually and with their communities — that will accelerate Blue Cross and Massachusetts’ journey towards health equity. According to Christina, “It didn’t feel like learning. It felt like support, growth, and transformation.”
Michele appreciated how the program gave her newfound perspective into systems and her own agency. “My favourite thing about the program is that it really opened my heart and my mind to a bigger picture,” she says.
For Alex, the program has shifted the lens through which he approaches his work. “It’s really been valuable for me to ask if, in the process of continuously improving upon our system, we’re involving the people it actually impacts,” he says.
Meanwhile, Brie and Blue Cross not only see the value of but are investing in a long-term partnership with GenUnity and its potential to positively impact health equity in Boston. “Our work with GenUnity has become a relationship, a friendship, a thought partnership.” Last year, Blue Cross made a 3-year, $400K+ commitment to GenUnity, ensuring their employees can engage meaningfully with communities to grow and deepen their impact within the organisation and beyond.
Blue Cross is committed to improving access to healthcare for people from all walks of life. Is your business ready to do the same?
If so, we invite you to join our upcoming Health Equity cohort, where you will connect with your community, learn new skills, and advance health justice.
Apply for our program today.