A Boston nonprofit born out of Harvard’s Innovation Labs is trying to build a national adult civic learning infrastructure, filling a gap that’s traditionally kept people from low-income backgrounds from getting engaged in their communities.
GenUnity co-founder Jerren Chang, a first-generation American who worked at McKinsey and in the Chicago mayor’s office before getting an MBA from Harvard, said there are huge barriers to immigrants and other Americans to getting involved in policymaking.
“They're proximate and passionate about local issues, but don't really know where to start and face all these barriers, from uncompensated time to historically poor civic education to obscure systems and policies. That makes it difficult to know how to engage,” Chang said in an interview.
GenUnity’s approach takes the form of a three-month program, with a cohort of 30 to 40 people from local employers and elsewhere across the community and focused on specific local issues. Its first few cohorts, a 2020 pilot and a 2021 follow-up, were on eviction and housing insecurity. The programs feature expert facilitators and teachers and worked through interpersonal and systemic barriers to community engagement. Then facilitators helped the participants develop action plans and they received grants of $5,000 to work in the community.
“A lot of our members were able to figure out their own housing insecurity during the program, given the knowledge they learned, and they were able to share that with their neighbors to help them avoid displacement as well,” Chang said.
The next cohort, coming in the spring of 2022, will focus on health equity.
The nonprofit's other co-founder is Nimisha Ganesh, also a Harvard Business School graduate who most recently worked at the social impact consulting firm Kitamba.
GenUnity has picked up grants from location foundations such as the Social Innovation Award from the Cambridge Community Foundation, as well as $140,000 from individual donors. It also cleared $100,000 in earned revenue through its programs this year, which is a major point of focus going forward.
“We see a world where we can do that type of program model across different issues, across different localities. And the way that we fund it is by working with employers,” Chang said. Companies can invest in employees by sending them to participate. Blue Cross Blue Shield is GenUnity’s biggest corporate partner so far, but it also has started working with several big pharmaceutical companies, banks and TJX.
GenUnity is already looking to expand to a second city, and Chang says the sky is the limit.
“I’m really excited about the progress that we’re seeing,” he said.
