Blue Shield of California employees joined other private sector volunteers to help the City of San Francisco through its Civic Bridge Day of Service program.
Civic Bridge is a program of the city and county's Office of Civic Innovation that recruits private sector professionals to volunteer their time to work alongside government employees on critical city issues. Since 2015, these cross sector partnerships have helped to tackle problems as varied as identifying ways to handle surges in 911 call volumes or increasing Medi-Cal enrollment.
Typically, the program is reserved for a 12-week program. However, in the first of its kind, there was a one-day workshop held on June 25. Four Blue Shield employees joined employees from companies including Adobe Inc., Cloudera, Slack Technologies Inc. and Twitter Inc. at 826 Valencia’s Tenderloin location.
Each team developed plans, on a pro bono basis, with multiple city agencies including the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development, Department of Homelessness Supportive Housing and Office of Economic and Workforce Development. While Blue Shield employees from Information Technology, Digital and Corporate Communications teams worked with the Department of Health's Street Medicine Team to improve its website content and messaging plan, other teams provided ideas ranging from how to create colorful public art in the neighborhood to how the city can better recruit for its open roles.