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When you talk to Christina Bryant, one word comes up again and again: purpose. And for Christina, purpose directs everything. She says that she’s “always guided my moral compass with trusting my purpose: helping people.” When Christina joined GenUnity in 2023, she brought twenty years of professional experience and a lifetime of advocating for change, and she’s brought that advocacy to our community as well.

Christina began her professional life with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (Blue Cross) before she even graduated high school. She would go on to hold fourteen different roles at the organization over the next twenty years, and all the while, she led with curiosity. She wanted to learn how to provide more access to more people, always living into her purpose within her work. Eventually, Christina became a Senior Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Consultant. In this role, she took on internal and external initiatives to embed DEI into every function at BCBSMA, and it was in this work that Christina encountered GenUnity.

Christina was first a member of the 2023 Health Equity cohort while working at Blue Cross. She loved the hard discussions GenUnity encourages: “People come to the conversations with their own reasons, but the more you have the conversations, you start to see how much alike a lot of us are…we can respect differences and exposure to new perspectives.” The Health Equity cohort was an obvious choice for Christina, working at Blue Cross, but that fall, she decided to join the Housing Security cohort as well. She saw how intimately housing security was tied to health outcomes, and she wanted to learn more.

In October of last year, Christina left Blue Cross to become the Chief Administrative Officer at St. Mary’s Center for Women and Children, an organization that serves women and families experiencing homelessness in Boston and advocates for systemic change. There, she leads Human Resources, Safety and Security, and IT, and serves on the Executive Management Team. Christina describes her work as “supporting the people supporting the people,” and it’s these people she works with that she’s proudest of at St. Mary’s. “Day in and day out they are influencing the trajectory of someone’s future. The passion they put behind our purpose is beyond humbling.” She’s also inspired by St. Mary’s mission, because as she states, “Everyone deserves a safe place to live.”

At St. Mary’s, Christina says, “I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone in regards to advocacy, using my power and privilege to be able to bring others along.” It isn’t only in her work that Christina does this. She’s always looking for opportunities to engage in conversations about social justice and change, to increase understanding of issues, and to create “good trouble.” She uses practices learned in GenUnity spaces, especially beginning hard conversations by naming how we’re showing up, to support this work. Her experience “expanded my knowledge and my reach more than I could have done on my own.” 

Through it all, Christina stays true to her stated purpose of helping people. That looks different in different times and places, as she recognizes. “I use the word support in a flexible way,” she says; “Support can mean different things to different people.” Christina’s approach to change is practical, inspired by her “why”--her family. She “wants my future’s future to be brighter,” and works to make it so. Christina’s earned wisdom is simple but powerful: “Change is hard and ever evolving…You need to say what you mean and mean what you say. You need to do things when someone is and isn’t watching. You need to show up.”