Apr24179 Best Impact-Focused Health & Benefits Organization 2024 – Canada & Social Finance Innovators of the Year 2024 – Canada GreenShield is the proud recipient of two awards within the Ethical Finance Awards 2024, and Mandy Mail, Executive Vice President, Head of GreenShield Cares, has been pivotal in scaling the company’s social impact efforts. She joins us to share how the business is implementing forward-thinking strategies to advance its social mission of ‘Better Health for All.’ Has social impact always been a core focus for GreenShield? Social impact has always served as much more than a means of giving for GreenShield. It’s embedded into our DNA. In 1957, our founder, William Wilkinson watched as a mother went without her own medication so that she could afford a prescription for her sick child. Knowing there had to be a better way, he established GreenShield as the first company in North America to offer a prepaid drug plan. To expand his impact, he set up the company as a non-profit from the onset, reinvesting excess earnings to support underserved Canadians. Nearly 70 years later, Wikinson’s original vision continues to guide our decisions. To advance our social mission, we’re now transforming to reinvent the health and benefits experience, as Canada’s first integrated payer-provider. We’re combining GreenShield’s long history of offering insurance, administering benefits, and paying claims as a ‘provider’, with digitalfirst health services such as mental health, pharmacy, telemedicine, and chronic disease management as a ‘provider.’ As we expand our service capabilities, in addition to reinvesting excess earnings, we now redeploy our services to support underserved Canadians. How have you maintained your commitment to your mission and the reinvestment of your earnings? We maintain our commitment to our social mission of ‘Better Health for All’ through an innovative and sustainable approach to social impact, which we refer to as our ‘Creating Shared Value’ (CSV) model. Through this model, we seamlessly and symbiotically integrate our social impact and business growth initiatives, so that each supports the other. Our CSV approach is multi-pronged. We leverage our innovation mindset to develop products and services that address the needs of equity-seeking groups. We also view societal issues through a social impact lens, which allows us to engage with stakeholders to inform policies and systemwide initiatives. Finally, we deploy our health services to support underserved communities and collaborate with community partners to scale access to culturally appropriate health services, to advance health equity nationally. In 2020, we set an ambitious goal to give back $75 million and positively impact one million lives by the end of 2025. We are well on track to achieve our goal, and the interconnectivity between purpose and performance is at the heart of our culture. How does GreenShield bring the CSV model to life? The first step in our CSV framework is to form meaningful partnerships with equity-seeking community organizations to fill the gaps in health equity. Our community partners help us understand the gaps, from an authentic and lived experience perspective. We use their knowledge to co-create culturally appropriate offerings tailored to the diverse needs of Canadians. Once proven, we scale the effective solutions and embed them into our GreenShield+ digital health platform to benefit all GreenShield clients and those they support. A recent example of culturally appropriate care is how we are bolstering our Women’s Mental Health program with culturally appropriate support for black women. Through a partnership with Black Mental Health Canada (BMHC), we co-created the QUEENS (Quest to Unite, Empower & Encourage Nubian Sisters) program to fill a gap in mental health care, providing black women tailored support and resources. The program is offered free of charge within our Women’s Mental Health Program, and will be incorporated into the broader GreenShield ecosystem, to benefit our clients and those they support. How does GreenShield track its social impact initiatives to ensure accountability to driving positive social change? The intersection of purpose and performance is integral to our success, and relies on a strong measurement framework. We measure the results of our social mission using our proprietary Impact Measurement Framework (IMF). The IMF allows us to understand the impact of our initiatives and investments based on social determinants of health, accessibility, and specific measurable outcomes. With our overarching goal to reinvest $75 million to positively impact at least one million Canadians by the end of 2025, we track the number of lives impacted (NLI). Last year alone, GreenShield grew our enterprise-wide impact investments to $11.3 million, positively impacting 200,000 lives across Canada. This brings cumulative totals to over $47 million invested and nearly 450,000 people positively impacted. GreenShield is creating a new blueprint for caring as a company. One that puts people at the centre of everything. What is one takeaway to leave our readers with? GreenShield believes that health care is a right, not a privilege. And we know we’re not alone. From the public sector to the private sector to other non-profit organizations, we are all working towards a common goal: to build a future where every Canadian can reach their full potential. It will take all of us to build the future we envision, and together we can harness our collective power to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Together, we can achieve Better Health for All. Pioneers for Change: GreenShield’s Journey to Becoming Canada’s Leading Non-Profit Social Enterprise
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