The majority of UCB’s thousands of members are parents and grandparents who live in under-resourced Boston neighborhoods: Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, and East Boston.
Boston is a city of tremendous innovation, education, and wealth, yet its residents face the greatest income and wealth inequality of any city in the country.
Our neighborhoods experience not only wealth, achievement, and life expectancy gaps, but also a profound civic engagement and trust gap as well. The mechanisms for getting to know neighbors and working towards the collective good are not as strong as they once were in tight-knit intergenerational communities.
Yet Massachusetts residents all share certain characteristics and needs:
We are social; no matter where in the world we live, we strive to interact and share with each other.
We are aspirational; virtually all of us want what is best for our families and our futures, and these interests drive many of our choices and behaviors.
We are interdependent; our fortunes are linked to those around us, which means we have a vested interest in the community network outside our front door.
And we are wired; for good or bad, we are connected to new technology.
UC is a network of people that share these characteristics and are working towards individual, family, and collective advancement.