Insurance companies today do a lot more for their communities than just providing risk mitigation and risk transfer products and services. According to the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF), many agencies provide volunteer days where staff contribute to a service project for a local non-profit, or the business adopts a non-profit organization and puts on a campaign to help with fundraising.
In fact, the IICF reports that more than 300,000 hours of volunteer service has been completed for non-profits in the foundation’s over 25 years of helping communities.
Major companies in the insurance sector also often have social responsibility and community giving goals. Sedgwick, for example, partners with and contributes to organizations that provide sustainable solutions for the social, health, and educational needs of its communities.
“We embrace and encourage every office – and we have nearly 900 of them around the planet – that each of them in their own community with the make-up of their workforce, whether they’re a small office or a large office, whatever they want to get engaged in in their community, they should do that,” said David North (pictured, above), president and CEO of Sedgwick. “We should encourage that, and provide our financial resources and our commitment to allow people to have the time to devote to things that they care about as individuals – that to me is the power of our charitable intent.”
In Phoenix, the company has provided support to the Children’s Hospital, while in Memphis, where Sedgwick is headquartered, the company does a lot of work with Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital. North was also asked to sit on the Board of Trustees for the University of Memphis, besides Sedgwick’s other involvements with education, such as the sponsoring of that university’s Finish Line Program, which helps students who had to abandon their college degrees get over the ‘finish line.’
For some insurance professionals, their involvement with communities is incredibly personal. Dillon Behr (pictured, below), an executive lines broker at Risk Placement Services (RPS) in Chicago, spent eight years in the US military. During his last mission in Afghanistan before coming back to the US in 2008, he was left with gunshot wounds and injured by shrapnel, and it took around two years for him to physically recover from the injuries, including having a prosthetic hip implanted.
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