This is a story about a three-year-old group founded by several women business executives in 2017 to nurture talent and further the careers of women in the health care industry.

The name of the group is WE, and among its founders is Andrea Fallin, a senior sales executive at Racher Press, publisher of MMR and its sister publication, Chain Drug Review.

Andrea is not the most prominent woman among the founders. Walmart executive Annie Walker, in addition to being a founding member, has been one of the catalysts in the organization, setting its purpose, driving its initiatives and pushing WE to new levels of expectation and achievement. The group’s third founder is Kim Sines of Hello Products.

Additionally, senior women at such organizations as the Emerson Group, Unilever, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Hello Products, Hallmark, Bayer and DSM are active and engaged members.

In the three years since its founding, WE has exerted a huge impact on the organizations these women work for and the retail sectors their organizations represent. It has done so not in the obvious and time-tested ways: It collects no dues, makes no special demands, asks no special favors. Rather, the organization succeeds by offering an open and inclusive community that mentors, that provides access to industry leaders (through one-on-one interviews with executives and participation in specific networking events), and that works to address the issues of the day — for example, racial inequality in the workforce.

Simply stated, WE’s focus is to move the role of women (and their male counterparts) forward, to advance the organization’s objectives and tear down the barriers that inhibit or retard them. A recent example of this is WE Move Forward, an educational panel series that addresses how companies must eliminate racial inequalities in business.

WE is an organization of individuals. To state this another way, its members are the executives who join, not the companies they represent. At present, it has some 252 active members, both women and men. It is a community of like-minded executives working to build the health care industry. It shuns such extravaganzas as annual meetings or marketing events. Rather, it functions through a group of individual committees that meet periodically throughout the year, usually in conjunction with larger industry events. It seeks — and succeeds — in bringing women front and center, integrating them into the fabric of the mass retail community in order to build that community for the future. Its goal is to make the senior executives who are members available to a wider retail audience.

WE’s strongest supporters are its members. “We’re interested in furthering the agenda of our members,” said Andrea, “and, through them, the agendas of the companies for which they work. We look for opportunities to be heard, to be listened to, to be taken seriously.”

Nothing unusual in this modest objective, save the obvious implication that these women have not always found it easy to be taken seriously. Too often, the thinking goes, it is easier to ignore these women. That makes Andrea’s final point more dramatic.

“We are thinking about the next generation,” she says. “We don’t want the group that follows us to struggle as we sometimes have. We want to level the playing field.”

To that end, the editors of MMR have provided Andrea space in the editorial pages of this publication to detail WE’s initiatives. Happily, she has agreed to contribute her thoughts and ideas in future issues from time to time.

Congratulations Andrea. We welcome you to our editorial staff.