Opening Doors: Michele Courton Brown (CAS’83)
Chief talent equity officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
Michele Courton Brown (CAS’83),
Chief talent equity officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts
They are determined to use their experience, influence, and positions to help make their business, organization, and world more inclusive. They are breaking barriers—and then reaching back to help those behind them overcome the same hurdles. They are BU alumni, faculty, and staff—of every race, ethnicity, age, and gender—and they are “Opening Doors” for the next generation.
Michele Courton Brown’s résumé traces what looks like an unbroken trail of success from the time she graduated from BU.
Brown (CAS’83) has been chief talent equity officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts since March. Before that she was the BCBS vice president of corporate development and managing director of Zaffre Investments, its strategic venture fund. In her previous role, she founded the BCBS Health Equity Accelerator Program, which provides a $250,000 investment and mentorship to founders of color focused on creating equitable healthcare services and solutions. She continues to lead the program.
For a decade before joining Blue Cross, she was CEO of Quality Interactions, Inc., a leading provider of “cultural competency training” for the healthcare industry. She’s also held top philanthropic positions at Bank of America, FleetBoston Financial Foundation, and Travelers insurance company.
“I do feel like I’ve had enormous privilege and enormous opportunity,” she says. “And I think it’s important to—I don’t want to say reach back—but reach around you. To support others to have the same experience. And so I’ve tried to live my career and my personal life aligned with those values.”
Brown, who recently finished an advanced management program at Harvard Business School and is working on a master’s in health communications at BU’s Metropolitan College, also has a wide range of extracurricular posts, including chairing the board of directors of the nonprofit YouthBuild USA and serving on the board of the Museum of Fine Arts.
“Early in my career, I started working in philanthropy, which gave me a huge view into the art of the possible with these amazing organizations that I was able to help,” she says. “Whatever I’ve been doing in my career, I’ve tried to make space for that kind of civic engagement.”
As a Black woman in America, though, she has also faced bias, both in and outside the corporate world. Inspired by the activism of her mother and grandmother, she has made a point of being undeterred.
Q&A
with Michele Courton Brown
Bostonia: How did you come to focus on health inequalities?
Brown: When I was in my 20s, I was executive director of the Travelers Insurance Companies Foundation, and I had a $5 million budget, focusing on healthcare initiatives, working very closely with the CEO and other executive leaders on the execution of this program. I had a job of influence.
And one day I woke up at 3 o’clock in the morning with a stomachache, a pain like I’ve never had before. I went to the emergency room. I had a sweatshirt on and jeans, I had my hair pulled back; I looked sort of young. And I couldn’t figure out why the medical staff were talking to me slowly. It turns out that they thought I was indigent. And so I got indigent care. Unfortunately, the stomachache I had was not a pregnancy—which is what they thought I was hiding from them—but instead a ruptured appendix. I was septic and I nearly died.
I internalized that experience for a long time. What could I have done better? Could I have been more demonstrative in communicating the level of pain I was in? What could I have done?
And when I moved to Boston and became president of the Bank of Boston Charitable Foundation and we did some early work in health equity, I learned about this issue of health disparities. Regardless of income or educational status, being a college grad, being reasonably articulate, health disparities happen. That [experience] stayed in my head: what could I do around that particular issue?
Bostonia: This led you to Quality Interactions, a company you headed for a decade and where you remain on the board.
Brown: I had an opportunity to meet three groundbreaking doctors who had developed content to help healthcare providers and frontline workers to be better communicators, to know what to do when they deal with somebody who’s got low health literacy, to deal with folks who don’t speak English and how you manage that or how different cultures have different family processes in place around medical decisions. I met these amazing doctors and they’re like, “Look, we’re great doctors, we’ve got good content, but we’re not businesspeople.” I was a businessperson looking for an opportunity to advance my social justice interests. And so that connection allowed me to take Quality Interactions, which at the time was like a consulting practice, into a full-fledged company that has some of the top hospitals and health plans in the country as customers even today.
Bostonia: Let me back up a little. How do you get from BU undergrad to head of the Travelers Foundation in just a few years?
Brown: I think that I’ve tried to punch above my weight class my entire career. So, I’ve been active on nonprofit boards since I was 25, and I’ve had amazing mentors and sponsors—people who believed in me and allowed me to stretch fully. I had those experiences early on.
I was working in finance when I left BU, in banking. I moved to Travelers, where I worked in private equity. And I was asked by one of our executives to take four months off from work to be a loaned executive with United Way. And I thought, did I do something wrong? Like, why are you asking me to do this? This has nothing to do with making deals, right?
But for me, that four-month period was transformative. It reminded me of the kind of community service work I did when I grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., alongside my mother and grandmother—how committed I was to community issues. And through networking, I met the head of the Travelers Companies Foundation, and we built a relationship. And he said, “I’ve got a role for you. It would be a role where you’d learn corporate philanthropy and not just grip-and-grin photo-making, but really the art of taking our human resources, our governmental relationships, and our influence as a business leader to effect social change.” I tutored with a man named Peter Labassi [a Travelers executive] for five years. He gave me structure and guidance, but also allowed me to flourish.
Bostonia: After Quality Interactions came Blue Cross Blue Shield, where you now serve this strategic goal of diversifying who the company is doing and developing business with?
Brown: The beautiful thing about doing this work at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is that they have a long-standing commitment to this work as well as the evidence of that—not just where we’re talking about it, but we’re actually making the right moves around DEIB [diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging].
That includes having a supplier diversity program that is, in my estimation, best in class. We’ve been able to commit to a fairly high percentage—I think it’s 13 percent of all of our buys—to diverse vendors, [including] veterans, people of color, LGBTQ people, women. I think that’s a really important statement that we are focused on that kind of equity.
The other demonstration of our commitment to DEIB is a program called Pay for Equity, which rewards our providers for improving the health outcomes of their patient population that fits the demographics of health disparities. And we’ve seen some early traction. We’re one of the first health plans in the country to implement a program like that, and we’ve also provided, I think, radical transparency, providing the tools and measurements that we’ve developed in an open source way to other health plans and other health organizations, so they can begin to use these tools as well. We haven’t siloed that knowledge, but really have sought to share that. And then of course we have 10 employee resource groups that we nurture and support. We’ve been an award-winning DEI program, so I think there’s lots of evidence of our commitment.
Bostonia: I suspect that night in the emergency room was not the only time when you have come up against barriers. How do you approach that when it happens?
I’ve experienced levels of bias. And I have worked very hard to not have it define me or limit me. One of the things I’ve experienced often is an underestimation of my capability. And I think my superpower is resilience. I’m just going to continue to plug through. Someone else’s limiting vision for me is not going to be my reality. As long as I’m capable of learning and growing and contributing, that’s what I’m gonna do.
Bostonia: Tell us about a time when you felt your path was blocked and you just kept going.
I guess the best example I can give to you is years old. When I left BU, I went to work for a regional bank. I participated in a training program, a very rigorous program—you had to get certain scores to stay in the program. The way the program ran, as you went through this formal training, you began to contribute as a financial analyst, and then you interviewed for loan officer jobs. No guarantee you’d get one, but most everybody seemed to get a job.
I was the first African American woman that they had hired into the program. And I went through the program and got very high marks but no job offers. So, I finally went to lunch with a loan officer who was hiring and he’s like, “I think you’re super smart. I’ve seen that our clients enjoy spending time with you. You have the ability to build relationships. I just don’t know that all of our customers are ready for a Black person as an account officer.”
It certainly felt disparaging. And limiting. But it was also a reality check around what my potential was in that organization. I had two choices. I could try to fight City Hall and prove them wrong, with a lot of resistance. Or I could take my skill set to the market and find an opportunity where I could get tailwinds, not headwinds. That’s what I did. And the next job was working in private equity at Travelers insurance company.
Bostonia: And all of this goes back to your mother and grandmother when you were growing up in Buffalo?
My mother was someone I’m convinced could have run GM if only they’d let her. She was principal of an elementary school, deeply involved in school integration at a local and state level, and a real champion of people with disabilities. When I was a young child, she was a special ed teacher, and I would go in and spend time with kids with spina bifida and other physical or mental health issues. That experience really humanized that population for me when I was very young. And my grandmother was a quintessential clubwoman—ran a number of clubs for Black women back in the ’30s and ’40s, was a member of the Eastern Star, and taught me all about how to run a meeting and how to organize people. I watched that from the time that I was sitting in a high chair. So, I had these two amazing exemplars of how to be.
Bostonia: How do you give back? How do you open doors for the next generation?
I mentor probably a half dozen younger people on a regular basis. Next week I’m participating in a C-suite speed-mentoring session that [a nonprofit organization called] Get Konnected! is hosting at Blue Cross Blue Shield, which is a sponsor. I’ve had the opportunity to do this every year for the last seven years—meet with young professionals and provide support. And that’s been a great way to give back.
In my capacity as vice chair of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, we have recently approved a new strategy in programming for the young people that we serve. We are the largest youth-serving nonprofit in the city of Boston, and the focus is on ready-to-work. The idea is that we’re going to imbue young people with hard and soft skills and academic support that positions them to be ready for work, which we’re defining as vocational work, military, college success, or direct into the workforce.
Bostonia: Are there times at all of these organizations when it’s been important for you to tell people how something looks through your eyes?
I think the goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion isn’t about having a “kumbaya” moment. It really is about bringing different perspectives to the table authentically. To improve a product, a service, a process. Ideally that’s what diversity should do. Study after study says when you have more women involved in decision-making, have more people of color, when you’ve brought in the perspective of everyone in the room, you have a better outcome. It’s with that lens that we are doing this work.
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