Audience: Companies

East Boston Social Centers Leverages Skills-Based Volunteers from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts to Promote Mental Health during COVID-19

As COVID-19 cases continue to climb across the country, many Americans are experiencing a mental health crisis too, especially healthcare and frontline workers. At East Boston Social Centers (the Social Centers), a nonprofit that provides afterschool programming, childcare, nutrition, and activities for the elderly, the staff were not exempt from the mental health toll of the pandemic. Blue Cross Blue Shield of …

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S3E1: Vu Le, NonprofitAF

S3E01: Vu Le, NonprofitAF

[There is] this narrative of ‘This is not who we are,’ when a lot of us, and I think a lot of folks from marginalized communities – Black, Indigenous folks, etc. – are saying, ‘This is exactly who we are, who we have been.’ I think about it like a twelve step program where you cannot really heal and change if you don’t go through the first step, which is to admit you have a problem, and we just haven’t done that. We as a nation just have not acknowledged that we have a problem here. This is who we are.

S2E27: Reflections on a Challenging, Clarifying, Transformative Year

S2E27: Reflections on a Challenging, Clarifying, Transformative Year

There’s been an intense focus on getting back to normal, but what this year and our Pro Bono Perspectives guests have highlighted is that normal is not okay and we don’t want to go back there. That to me is the light that is shining through the cracks: we are coming out of 2020 with a new and clear mandate for social and racial justice and a renewed sense of purpose.

S2E26: Tom Crohan, John Hancock

S2E26: Tom Crohan, John Hancock

It’s really important for those of us in a position of power – as a funder with nonprofit organizations especially – to be very transparent about it and not allow it to be a barrier for meaningful partnership. We’re not going to have the impact that we want to have if it’s us telling you exactly how we want you to run programs for us; it will be far more fruitful for us to have a conversation about the outcomes we seek to achieve – ideally together – and then to think about resources we have or you have and hopefully align on the impact we can have together.

S2E25: Shalu Umapathy, IDEO.org

S2E25: Shalu Umapathy, IDEO.org

How do we put the [communities] in the driver’s seat? When we’re investing our time and our resources and our energy, how are we shifting the power that may have sat with funders who might have pre-determined what those criteria were, and create a new set of criteria around investments?