As Pride Month approaches, the parade of corporate campaigns is queueing up. But Unilever, which has been working to stand apart the past three years, this year is taking it a step further by launching an ambitious effort to bring change to five small cities rated among the worst in the U.S. in terms of conditions for LGBTQ+ people.

The marketer of Dove, Axe, Hellmann’s and Ben & Jerry’s worked with agency RanaVerse and LGBTQ+ community strategist Sean Coleman to select the five cities among 17 that scored zero on the Human Rights Campaign’s Municipal Equality Index—which ranges from 0-100 based on everything from non-discrimination laws to bullying.

Those cities include Monroe, Louisiana; Moore, Oklahoma; Clemson, South Carolina; Florence, Alabama; and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The United We Stand program has joined with local LGBTQ+ organizations including Forum for Equality, Freedom Oklahoma, South Carolina Black Pride, The Knights and Orchids Society and Pflag to address issues in each area, with a goal of moving the score for those cities higher in subsequent index rankings, says Conor Feeney, senior marketing manager at Unilever North America.

Black female transgender filmmaker Tourmaline has been commissioned to create films to be released in June that will bring stories of the five communities to life. Unilever will kick off this year’s United We Stand effort internally on June 5, with the films going live June 7.

RanaVerse founder Rana Reeves sees Unilever’s effort as proof brands can do much more meaningful work around Pride Month than they have been. The story really goes back three years, he says, when Esi Eggleston Bracey, exec VP and chief operating officer for North American Beauty, approached him about making over Unilever’s Pride efforts to make them more meaningful.

“I’ll speak from the first person rather than from Unilever, but there are issues for me with the corporatization of Pride,” says Reeves. “The traditional way of doing Pride for brands is you use the old rainbow. You may or may not bring out a product. You give 100K because it sounds big, five figures, to Glaad. You use a word like acceptance and maybe two white muscle queens and a drag queen. And it’s like, check.”

But the needs of the LGBTQ+ community are considerably bigger, more tangible and more complex, he says. “The average life expectancy of a trans woman of color in this country is 35. Forty percent of homeless youth in this country identify as LGBTQ. There are suicide and mental health issues and food deprivation.”

Corporate Pride efforts traditionally focus on New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami, Reeves says. “There’s so much geographic privilege. But there are cities in America where people march for Pride in the true sense of the word and people are throwing stones attacking them.”

“We wanted to get outside of those city bubbles and focus on areas where we can really affect real change,” Unilever’s Feeney says.

Future efforts might extend to additional cities, and Unilever will monitor progress when the new Human Rights Campaign index comes out in December. “To me, going from zero to five still means progress,” Reeves says.

Issues to be confronted in the five cities include conversion therapy, decriminalization of HIV, food insecurity and bullying. Nationally, Unilever also recently said it will lobby against state anti-transgender legislation. That effort, along with focusing on local change efforts, broadly parallels Unilever’s Dove in its work to pass Crown Act laws against hairstyle discrimination locally and nationally.