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Deepening Blue Cross Blue Shield’s impact by adding a skills-based volunteer program

This skills-based program is an initiative that goes beyond pure labor to helping our community partners build and sustain expertise and infrastructure needed for their continued success and growth.

Andrew Dreyfus

President & CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

Services We Provided

Social Impact Consulting - Consulting and design services to help companies start or expand a social impact program or incorporate a skills-based volunteer component in an existing program.

The Challenge

Over the past 75 years, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) has maintained a strong commitment to its community partners, bringing strong financial and traditional volunteering support to improve health outcomes and the quality of life for residents of the Commonwealth. They recognized, however, that their community partners were struggling to invest in the critical organizational infrastructure they needed to deliver healthy foods, respond to crisis situations and deliver on-the-ground healthcare services their clients needed to thrive. Leveraging their greatest strength, BCBSMA found the solution: a company-wide launch of a skills-based volunteer program that would leverage the skills and talent of their associates to unlock acute capacity challenges faced by their community partners.

The Solution

Common Impact, a pioneer in designing tailored, strategic skills-based volunteer programs that build the capacity of the nonprofit sector and talent in the corporate sector at once, was approached by BCBSMA. The two organizations worked closely together to craft a program that would address BCBSMA’s community goals while integrating into its core operations and business practices. Ultimately, a program was launched in which small teams of BCBSMA associates provided guidance and deliverables that addressed key strategic challenges at BCBSMA’s current nonprofit partners in 4 month engagements – each intended to impact their community partner’s ability to help the communities most vulnerable children and families thrive and engage as healthy citizens.

Our Impact

The skills-based volunteer program has generated tremendous results and is still going strong. Learn more about a team of BCBSMA employee volunteers supported the East Boston Social Centers with a recent skills-based volunteer project.