This Women's Network event will offer an insightful conversation with Dr. Melissa Gilliam, the 11th President of Boston University and both the first woman and the first Black woman to lead the institution since its founding in 1869.
06/18/2025
11:30am - 1:00pm
Fairmont Copley Plaza
Join the Chamber and Massachusetts Business Roundtable for a deep dive into employer insights, featuring analysis from McKinsey and a panel of experts.
06/26/2025
11:00am - 12:00pm
Virtual
Join us for our installment of the Pacesetters Doing Business series featuring Mass General Brigham on June 26, 2025.
1:00pm - 2:00pm
This program is in redevelopment. Click this page for DEI resources.
Our Women’s Leadership Program enables you to take your leadership to the next level by arming you with the most in-demand leadership toolkit.
Our Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL) program provides emerging leaders with a socially conscious and civically engaged leadership toolkit, as well as the opportunity to apply their knowledge through experiential assignments.
Join us on June 12 for a highly interactive virtual workshop with Strategic Career & Leadership Coach Carole-Ann Penney.
City Awake empowers young professionals in a variety of ways that encourages these rising leaders to stay invested in the region’s future success.
We are developing an ecosystem of corporations and partners with the influence and buying power to transform economic inclusion for minority business enterprises (MBEs).
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BIMA (the Boston Interactive Media Association) serves a vibrant community of like-minded professionals from agencies, brands, publishers, and ad-tech companies with business interests in the New England market.
For over 30 years, the Chamber’s Women’s Network has connected female professionals of all background and career levels. Today, our Women’s Network is the largest in New England, strengthening the professional networks of women each year.
The Massachusetts Apprentice Network convenes employers, training providers, and talent sources interested in developing and implementing apprenticeship programs in occupations across industries and statewide in fields such as tech, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and more.
Explore our mission and values to better understand how we are leading the business community forward.
Our member directory is your resource to discover, connect, and engage with Boston’s businesses from every industry and sector.
The Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce is excited to reintroduce City Awake as the Chamber’s program to invest in the next generation of greater Boston leaders, offering a unique platform for young professionals to bring their voices and ideas to important civic and economic issues. The repositioning combines the Chamber’s existing Young Professionals Network – which was launched in 2015 – with City Awake. In 2016, the Chamber first partnered with City Awake, then an independent program focused on social enterprise and facilitating civic dialogue among Boston’s young adults.
Now merged together under the City Awake name, the program seeks to empower next generation leaders through community-building programming and engage young professionals in dialogue about the most pressing issues facing our region. Ultimately, the goal of City Awake is to deepen young professionals’ connections to the broader business and civic communities, while also celebrating their important contributions to the region’s economy.
Greater Boston as a whole has no real program aimed at the development, engagement and retention of our young professional population, yet our economy is, in large part, positioned around our reputation for an unbeatable, innovative and talented workforce. With City Awake’s expanded direction, we hope to fill some of that void, by engaging deeper both inside our own member companies and out to really capture, advance and celebrate the perspectives and contributions of young professionals in our business, civic and political discourse.
– James E. Rooney, President & CEO, Greater Boston Chamber
“With our relaunch, we want to show that the Chamber’s young professional efforts go so much further than just convening,” said Justin Kang, founder and executive director of City Awake, and the Chamber’s vice president of economic growth. “This is about connecting with a purpose: we’re forging partnerships across sectors and activating the next generation of talent so that they build deep roots in our region while they’re working alongside established leaders to advance solutions to key public policy issues impacting young professionals.”
“Cultivating and retaining a talented workforce is a key issue for the Chamber’s membership,” said Navjot Singh, board chair for the Greater Boston Chamber and Managing Partner for the Boston Office of McKinsey & Company. “The City Awake program is an excellent way for our business community to show young professionals that we are invested in their development, that we are listening to their concerns and, more importantly, that we value their ideas about how to best position Greater Boston for long term success.”
City Awake programming includes:
Beyond programming, City Awake also works with the Chamber’s Public Policy team and other partners to examine and shine light on policy issues affecting young professionals such as affordable housing, transportation and economic opportunity to make an impact on these issues through informative reports, insightful panel discussions and other creative projects. Their first report, produced in partnership with the Boston Foundation, was City of Millennials: Improving the Future Prospects of our Region and its Young Adults. The report provides an overview and analysis of trends among Greater Boston’s young adult population and examines key findings from a survey of local millennials.
According to a 2017 Boston Planning and Development Agency report, among the 25 most populous US cities, Boston has the highest concentration of 20-24 year olds, and residents between the ages of 18 and 34 make up nearly 40 percent of the city’s total population. In addition, young adults aged 25 to 34 are some of the city’s most educated, with 67 percent having a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to twenty percent of all residents 25 and over.
When you look at who is coming and going in a given year in Boston, young adults between the ages of 18 and 34 make up 70 percent of our new arrivals and 63 percent of those leaving. Through City Awake, we want to get that second number down by connecting these young leaders to one another and their city in a way that keeps them invested in seeing Greater Boston succeed far into the future.
– Jim Rooney
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