Share ThisHighmark Bright Blue Futures is the organization’s charitable giving and community involvement program. This series provides in-depth articles on its work, community partners, and leaders as they advance their goals around Community Health and Community and Economic Resilience. In this article, we get an overview of the program’s strategic framework and focus areas.
Many large corporations can point to a mix of philanthropy, community work, and employee volunteering as part of their commitment to giving back. Some have well-known signature programs that represent a long-term focus on an area of need, like improving education opportunities for underserved populations.
But Highmark Bright Blue Futures, launched in 2022 as a unifying platform for the organization’s charitable giving and community involvement work, stands out in its scope, ambition, and close connection with a broader corporate mission, including Highmark Health’s Living Health strategy.
The program’s web pages and inaugural annual report are excellent places to learn more about Highmark Bright Blue Futures in action. In the meantime, let’s kick off this magazine’s new Highmark Bright Blue Futures series with a deeper dive on the program itself.
In a previous interview, Kenya Boswell, senior vice president of Community Affairs, emphasized that Highmark’s health plan businesses in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York have all been deeply involved in their communities for decades. But Highmark Bright Blue Futures isn’t just a new way of talking about that legacy, it’s a strategic framework to make the legacy even stronger in the years ahead. Specifically, Boswell says it is about clarifying and amplifying the impact of philanthropy and community work.
“If someone asks what we stand for, what we’re trying to achieve, with our charitable giving and community involvement, we have a very clear answer,” she says. “Our focus is on improving equitable access to care, quality of life, and economic resilience in the communities we serve.”
Dan Onorato, Highmark Health’s chief corporate affairs officer, adds that the organization touches millions of lives, particularly in its core health insurance markets.
“We live and work in the communities we serve, and we have outstanding partnerships and relationships in each of our regions,” he says. “With Highmark Bright Blue Futures, we combine our existing strengths as a community partner with being very strategic about where we can make a difference and align more closely with our purpose and operations as a blended health organization.”
The strategic framework for Highmark Bright Blue Futures starts with two pillars: Community Health and Community and Economic Resilience. It is also a deeply collaborative, partner-driven approach. And its front-line “people magic” includes strong executive involvement and employee engagement programs.
We can all get behind aspiring to “brighter futures for everyone,” and many people might agree that “community health” and “economic resilience” are good places to start. But the clarity of the Highmark Bright Blue Futures framework comes with its logically connected layers of detail. For example, the Community Health strategic pillar is composed of five focus areas that loosely parallel the CDC’s Healthy People 2030 social determinants of health domains:
“If we just stop with the idea that our community work prioritizes ‘health,’ that wouldn’t explain enough,” Boswell says. “When we say our ultimate goal is to improve equitable access to care, quality of life, and economic resilience, that gives you a better picture, but it’s still broad. The focus areas under our two strategic pillars, and the real-world examples we provide on our site and in the annual report, are where we really show how we work with our partners to make an impact.”
She notes that each focus area has plenty of flexibility — inviting a wide range of organizations to feel included and see where their work fits in.
“With access to care, one of my favorite examples is the Mission of Mercy free dental clinics,” she says. “This is literally advancing equitable access to care, because regardless of ability to pay, people can go to these clinics for anything from a routine cleaning and exam to a root canal. Multiple parts of our organization are involved. At the same time, that’s just one way to improve access to care — that focus area also includes our support of health literacy and other efforts that are also important.”
Similarly, she points out that the “education access” focus area prioritizes helping people get into health care careers. However, it also includes support for broader education scholarship programs like Pittsburgh Promise and Say Yes Buffalo. The “neighborhood and built environment” focus area broadens the definition of community health to include investments like a $750,000 contribution to help the Pittsburgh Penguins and Hunt Armory transform a blighted property into a top-class ice rink that expands access to ice skating and hockey for kids and families throughout the city.
“When you look at the work under the Community Health pillar, much of it directly supports our Living Health focus on improving health outcomes and reducing health disparities,” Onorato adds. “It’s not just charitable giving, it’s investing in the health of our communities.”
The Community Health pillar has a direct connection to Highmark Health’s work as a leader in health, coverage, and care. But Boswell emphasizes that the organization also believes it has a social responsibility to its communities to help move diversity, equity and inclusion forward in a transformative way, to improve economic well-being, and to strengthen connection and quality of life by supporting arts and culture.
That all falls under the program’s second strategic pillar: Community and Economic Resilience. Other examples under this pillar include human services like those provided through the United Way, workforce training and development programs, and efforts to improve the standard of living.
“When you look at the Community and Economic Resilience section of our Highmark Bright Blue Futures annual report, it shows a clear goal — to improve economic well-being and quality of life in communities of every type and size — but also flexibility in how we do that and who we partner with,” Boswell explains.
That flexibility is evident in the examples cited: support of Juneteenth and Pride activities, sponsorship of diverse arts and cultural events, United Way giving, and the organization’s crisis response efforts in Buffalo.
“The approach of our Community Affairs team, and across our entire enterprise, is highly collaborative — we are an active, engaged community partner and we put in the time and effort needed to build strong, trusted relationships with stakeholders in each community,” Onorato says.
In our earlier interview, Boswell put it this way: “We do so much behind the scenes. There is really a belief that the success of Community Affairs is defined by how well we help others reach their goals. That’s external partners and internal partners like colleagues in our health care system, the Enterprise Equitable Health Institute, and the Social Determinants of Health function.”
The Highmark Bright Blue Futures annual report and website include many collaboration success stories. Perhaps the best known and longest-running example is The Highmark Walk for a Healthy Community. Founded in 2003, this annual fundraising walk now benefits local health and human service agencies in seven different communities. As of 2022, more than 500 nonprofit organizations have raised more than $17 million through these events. Highmark coordinates and underwrites all costs, so 100% of funds raised go directly to the participating organizations.
Boswell says another favorite example from 2022 was a wide-ranging collaboration to build a KABOOM! playground, including not only Highmark and Duquesne Light, but also volunteers from the PA Municipal League Conference of Mayors.
“We keep talking about what was so magical about it,” she says. “It's not the first playground we had volunteers participate in, or that we sponsored. The magic came with the level of collaboration. It reinforced our appreciation for organizations that have the ability to bring multiple stakeholders together and are not working in a silo. They are on the ground, doing great work, but also understand the value of leveraging partnerships to get the job done.”
Boswell says the KABOOM! project is also an example of going “beyond the check” when it comes to community involvement.
“The funding was vital, but I think our human capital was even more important,” she says. “That playground wouldn't have been built in seven hours if we did not have Highmark Health volunteers, Duquesne Light volunteers, PA Municipal League volunteers, and a great partner relationship with KABOOM!”
Human capital brings us to what might be described as a third pillar of the Highmark Bright Blue Futures framework. Community Health and Community and Economic Resilience are the strategic pillars, defining what the program supports and how it intends to make an impact. But the constant behind all of its diverse efforts is the commitment and engagement of the organization’s leaders and employees.
“When we think about community giving, it’s not just financial support, it’s all the ways that we can provide expertise, it’s on-the-ground volunteers, it’s showing up to support different groups in our communities,” Boswell explains. “That strengthens the connection and trust with our community partners, and these experiences are also deeply meaningful for our leaders and employees. It’s great to take pride that your organization supports good work, but our approach also presents many opportunities to do the good work, and see the impact we’re making firsthand.”
The 2022 annual report highlights a long-running United Way employee giving program that raised $1.1 million, as well as recording more than 28,000 hours of employee volunteer time through an enterprise volunteer and giving platform, YourCause.
It also profiles three senior executives who lead by example when it comes to community involvement:
The Highmark Bright Blue Futures annual report and the program’s web pages go a long way toward communicating what the organization stands for and the impact it is achieving. This new digital magazine series will be another way to share some of the literally hundreds of inspiring stories connected to Highmark Bright Blue Futures.
Boswell explains that she believes in both qualitative and quantitative ways to gauge success and make adjustments as necessary. “There are some numbers and fast facts throughout the Highmark Bright Blue Futures community report, but it is primarily qualitative — we really wanted to bring the program to life through storytelling and show the personal connections and impacts behind what we do.”
She adds that there is also an enterprise-wide focus on evolving quantitative measures, including development of an ESG reporting framework and the launch of a new data integration, analysis, visualization and reporting platform.
“You need complementary approaches — the storytelling you see in our Highmark Bright Blue Futures annual report, along with the long-term quantitative measurements you see in ESG reports, which don’t always have a narrative component,” Boswell says. “Both approaches contribute to understanding whether your investments and resources and activities are achieving the desired impact, and where you might have opportunities to pivot and achieve better outcomes. We don’t stop with, ‘here’s how much we gave.’ We really want to show how much positive change we helped achieve — how much progress we’re making in helping everyone have a brighter future.”
Highmark Health and its subsidiaries and affiliates comprise a national blended health organization that employs more than 42,000 people and serves millions of Americans across the country.
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