Life Science Cares: mobilizing biotechs to local community action and immediate impact

Founder General Atlantic’s Rob Perez leverages industry goodwill to address poverty, work with local non-profits

With growing footprints in four biopharma hubs and a fifth on the way, Life Science Cares is organizing companies to alleviate poverty and inequality in their home communities via vetted non-profit partners.

The six-year-old organization, founded by General Atlantic’s Robert Perez in Boston, provides multiyear, unrestricted grants to non-profits focused on socioeconomic and health disparities, and further supports these partners by recruiting volunteers, donating goods, and helping craft programs that capitalize on industry’s resources and strengths.

Perez has recruited a banner roster of top industry names to the boards of each of the four hubs, creating an opportunity for leveraging their influence to greater benefit in their local communities.     

Perez told BioCentury he started Life Science Cares with the idea that biopharma is filled with “small organizations that have extraordinarily committed people that care deeply about humanity, but most of those organizations don’t have an effort to focus on the problems that exist today, particularly related to poverty and inequality.”

“The fruits of their labor doesn’t come for decades,” he said. “This is a vehicle to tap the caring that’s already in the industry.”

Life Science Cares supports non-profits working in three areas: basic survival needs such as food, shelter and healthcare; education, with a focus on STEM; and workforce sustainability, including job creation, training, mentoring and economic development. 

According to Perez, some industry leaders were uncertain at first about whether to include the basic needs pillar, wondering if it would be better to stick to more familiar work in STEM education. But basic needs have since become “one of our most significant volunteer areas,” he said.

“I have a very strong belief that unless you have access to basic needs, nothing else really matters,” said Perez. “People appreciate that the impact is so direct and immediate.”

Over the past three years, Life Science Cares opened chapters in Philadelphia, San Diego and the Bay Area, recruiting industry leaders in each hub to serve on the new chapters’ Boards of Directors or Managers (see Table).

Among them is George Scangos, who first joined the Boston chapter while serving as CEO of Biogen Inc. (NASDAQ:BIIB), and later became the inaugural chair of the Bay Area board after joining San Francisco-based Vir Biotechnology Inc. (NASDAQ:VIR) as President and CEO.

The next hub to gain a chapter is New York City, and “there’s even some talk about galvanizing something in Europe,” said Canaan’s Nina Kjellson, who serves on the Bay Area chapter’s Board of Directors. 

She said the board prioritizes partnerships where the life sciences community is particularly well-placed to move the needle. “We’re looking for organizations where one plus one can equal three with involvement from us,” Kjellson said.

Medicxi Ventures’ Francisco de Rubertis thinks Life Science Cares’ focus on local impact is a major difference-maker. “If you see the impact of the good you’re doing, you’re going to be incentivized to do it more, more so than if you were just sending a check somewhere,” he said. “It’s this proximity model that I really embrace.”

Life Science Cares has given more than $9 million in grants to dozens of nonprofits, engaged more than 500 companies as volunteers and sponsors, mobilized thousands of volunteers, and collected more than $1 million of donated goods.

Companies that participate stand to reap the benefits of a more engaged workforce, particularly next- generation leaders seeking to create social impact beyond healthcare.

“People want companies to back up their vision statements with activity,” said Sarah MacDonald, executive director of the Life Science Cares Boston chapter.

By acting as a corporate social responsibility engine for a wide range of companies, many too small to have those functions in-house, Life Science Cares is also building community across its membership, said Bay Area Executive Director Aisha Baro.

“What I think is special about this model is that it catalyzes a whole industry,” Baro said.

Supporting the experts

Over the years, Life Science Cares has honed its strategy for identifying the right non-profit partners, and how it can best help them. 

“Understanding where we fit is probably where we’ve gotten a lot better,” said Perez. “Our goal is to be the best partner, not necessarily the best funder.”

He said that when the organization was first getting started, it picked well known, high quality non-profits “that didn’t raise a lot of eyebrows,” but found its opportunity for impact was limited. “Some of them were so big we didn’t move the needle very much.  With others, they didn’t need us as much as they needed huge funding,” Perez said.

Since then, Life Science Cares has focused on having in-depth conversations with smaller organizations to understand what they really need to “help them unlock their secret sauce,” he said. “Often it’s not just money.”

A core feature of Life Science Cares’ strategy is to follow the expertise of those on the ground.

“We view our non-profit partners, especially those who have lived experience, as the drivers of the experience,” said Baro. “We want to enable them to do their work, but not dictate how they do their work.”

One example is the organization’s work with ALAS, a non-profit based on the Bay Area’s Peninsula coast side that supports farmworker communities, who are underserved and majority Latino.

ALAS had surveyed farmworkers and found many weren’t accessing healthcare because they didn’t have transportation and couldn’t afford to take time off work, and was seeking ways to bring healthcare directly to them.

The non-profit brought that vision to Life Science Cares, and together they crafted a roadmap to developing the Farmworker Equity Express, a retrofitted double-decker bus that will provide virtual connections to telehealth and online tutoring, among other services.

Through Life Science Cares, the Genentech Inc. unit of Roche (SIX:ROG; OTCQX:RHHBY) contributed the know-how of its transportation team, which runs similar buses as commuter shuttles. Other components of the “thought partnership” with ALAS included supply chain expertise and marketing, Baro said.

Another example is Life Science Cares’ partnership with Cambridge, Mass.-based Food for Free, which rescues food that would otherwise been thrown away and distributes it to people in need.

In addition to providing funding and volunteers, Life Science Cares helped them build their headquarters, and connected them with food service departments at larger biopharma companies that could add to their supply. “Sitting down with them and connecting them with our community, that’s where the magic is unlocked,” Perez said.

He cited Life Science Cares’ work with The Possible Project in Boston, which supports entrepreneurship by high school students, as a case where industry connections go a lot further than funding could. One of the organization’s student-run businesses is an online reseller, with a big focus on refurbished electronics; Life Science Cares contacted IT heads across its local community and collected 1,000 used laptops for the students to work with. 

“It helps teach inventory, maintenance, and marketing of these laptops,” Perez said. “We could have written them a check, but they would have bought a lot fewer laptops, and it wouldn’t have been as meaningful.” 

In the last few years, Life Science Cares has expanded its remit beyond supporting external partners by creating Project Onramp, a paid internship and mentorship program that has placed about 200 underrepresented students in over 80 biopharma companies. “Some of these were small companies that never had an intern,” Kjellson said.

Bringing students into biopharma companies and sending employees out into the community can build local communities’ understanding of what the industry does, which is typically scant despite its growing physical footprint.

“I would often hear, ‘we see your shiny buildings, but we have no idea what’s happening inside,’” MacDonald said. “By having visibility in the community over a long period of time, with hundreds of ambassadors showing up in spaces they haven’t before, it may start to bridge barriers and start conversations about what biotech is.”

Choose your own adventure

Life Science Cares wants to make the process of getting involved as “frictionless and transparent” as possible for companies and individuals alike, said Kjellson. “We want it to feel like a no-brainer.”

Each chapter has a Board of Directors or Board of Managers comprised of local life sciences leaders who commit to an individual financial contribution; serve on committees for development, grant making, partnerships or governance; and are ultimately responsible for reviewing and selecting the chapter’s non-profit partners.

Each hub also has a wider Board of Advisors, who also make personal financial contributions, and often organize their companies to volunteer with partner organizations. Contributions from individual board members cover the organization’s administrative costs, so that all the money raised by other individuals, fundraiser events and the organization’s corporate membership program is channeled directly to the non-profit partners.

Board members typically recommend non-profits they know and invite them to apply, and the Life Science Cares staff plays an important role in the recommendation process as well, Perez said. “They are extremely well-connected to other non-profit leaders.”

Companies can join as corporate partners at different funding levels, depending on their budgets, revenues, and headcount, with contributions starting at $2,500 per year.

“They get access to the Life Science Cares team to plan, execute and strategize ways they can give back,” MacDonald said, enabling companies to outsource corporate social responsibility functions they may not have the bandwidth for.

“There’s nobody internally at most small or medium-sized biotechs that is only thinking about community engagement,” she said, adding that Life Science Cares can also support internal HR teams and employee committees already planning charitable activities, such as holiday toy drives.

By serving as a connector to the entire industry, Life Science Cares can also provide continuity for non-profits, who may have otherwise seen individual relationships with companies wither if an internal champion leaves, or if the company is wound down or acquired. “We can build connections over a period of time, over scientific and financial ups and downs,” MacDonald said.

She said Life Science Cares can also help weave service and impact into the fabric of companies as they grow. “Moderna has been a partner with us before anybody knew what it was. We’ve seen them grow as community partners, launching a foundation and setting up official pillars of giving, while maintaining grassroots volunteer engagement.”

Perez said larger companies have also been active members and made substantial financial contributions.

“It would have been easy for them to say, we kind of already do that, so leave us out of this, but that’s not what happened,” he said. “They tell us Life Science Cares is the best value in town,” because it frees them from having to curate organizations themselves, allowing them to engage their employees efficiently.

Individual employees are also welcome to volunteer and contribute at any level they can, regardless of whether their company or leadership is active in the organization. Life Science Cares has also created a “Council of Champions,” which MacDonald described as a next-generation leadership board that helps plan events and support programs by engaging their networks.

Upcoming events include fundraisers by the San Diego chapter on Oct. 19, the Philadelphia chapter on Oct. 20 and the Bay Area chapter in San Francisco on Nov. 3.

Baro said the next phase for Life Science Cares is scaling while remaining lean. The organization has primarily grown via word of mouth, and is now shifting to more direct outreach, including via social media. 

Another direction is adapting their local-focused model to accommodate companies who operate in multiple hubs.

“The motto has been very locally driven to date, but more and more we’re running into companies with employees in all the cities where we operate, who want us to have more consistent offerings,” said Baro. “We’re looking more at how we can create a package that makes sense for a company across all five sites.”