On the latest episode of Changemakers from Within, we had the honor of sitting down with Stacey Baxter, the Engagement Strategy Manager and leader of the Social Impact Comittee at Castlight Health.
Castlight health is a B2B2C health navigation platform, connecting with hundreds of health vendors, benefits resources, and plan designs and giving rise to the world’s first comprehensive app for all health needs.
Capacity Building
Stacey’s zeal for volunteering began at a young age. After college, she joined the Peace Corps and soon found herself in Botswana, Africa, working as a Local Government and Community Capacity Builder. In this role, she identified community leaders, built their capacity, and partnered with them to initiate income-generating projects, youth development projects and HIV-prevention projects.
Her next adventure began at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, as a National Campaign Services Manager. During this role, she began seeing a common thread between her professional experiences- capacity building and the passion to make the the world a better place. As the concept of corporate social responsibility became more and more prevalent in Stacey’s mind, she realized she had to align her next career pivot with her past experiences and attachment to social impact.
Day and Night Job
Stacey wears multiple hats at Castlight. Her day job, as she calls it, is titled as an Engagement Strategy Manager, where she works with clients to engage their employees in using Castlight.
Castlight is a mission driven company, working to make it as easy as humanly possible for individuals to navigate the healthcare system and live happier, healthier, more productive lives. Thus, Stacey tells us it was easy to make the transition into her “night job” as a social impact leader at Castlight.
After she got involved with a few volunteering projects, she realized that employee participation was low for a company of Castlight’s size. From there, she worked with two coworkers on how to strategize what social impact may look like at the company. The most important part of this process she says: meeting with the CEO.
Transforming Castlight
One of the most important transitions that Castlight has made since Stacey’s impactful presence, was creating a model of racial justice. This model is split into four spheres:
- Product: What programs can we change at Castlight?
- Company: What can Castlight itself do? (for ex. external speakers, book clubs, discussions).
- Individual: How can our employees reflect on their own?
- Community: How can we help our communities? (for ex. supporting locally owned businesses, volunteering, etc).
Following this, Stacey revealed to us that Castlight’s CEO sent out a social impact and racial justice survey to the company, which had a ton of engagement and lit a fire under employees at the company.
Nowadays, Castlight’s social impact arm looks very different than when Stacey first joined the company. Social impact programming has diffused throughout the entire company; the culture team has been split into different subcommittees such as social impact, volunteering and charitable giving. Social impact is essentially embedded into everything Castlight is doing.
Keeping your Options Open
We asked Stacey what she would say to folks looking to break into the social impact world. Her advice?
Do not narrow yourself to looking at just social impact jobs. Instead, she says, look for jobs that align with your experience and companies that align with your passions. “In addition to your day job, you want to help cultivate the company by doing social impact work… and that’s something you would bring to the table.”
Leaving a Lasting Impact
Now what’s next for social impact programming at Castlight? Stacey tells us, “I want to build a strong enough foundation that if anyone were to leave, this program would still be standing. I want people to have a way to give back and make a difference in communities.”
Engraining corporate social responsibility into Castlight aligns perfectly with their company mission to make people’s lives happier, healthier and more productive. Stacey’s hard work has without a doubt left a lasting impact at Castlight, and we can’t wait to see what she does next!
