5th Annual Bridge Week Draws Over 10,000 Hours of Service

The 5th Annual IICF Bridge Week wrapped up recently, followed by the Southern California luncheon featuring speaker Ken Venturi, a golf commentator, former PGA Tour professional, and humanitarian. The luncheon honored volunteers in Southern California who participated in this year’s Bridge Week.

Bridge Week, a project born of the Insurance Industry Charitable Fund (IICF), is a nine-day event in which volunteers from the insurance industry participate throughout the state of California in numerous charitable missions at local nonprofit organizations.

This year, at least 2,500 volunteers logged an estimated 10,000 hours of service, partaking in 200 different projects, according to Karen Chin, IICF CEO. Eighty-four agencies welcomed the volunteers.

“We really have been extending and strengthening our presence in the non-profit world throughout the state of California. We’ve been growing in the central California area, up in Sacramento, Marin County,” Chin said.

The IICF is the only program for any industry throughout the entire country that organizes a core group of volunteer employees from their respective companies to go out and make a difference in the lives of those served by their local nonprofits.

“A lot of the nonprofits actually are not geared to having volunteers,” Chin said. “Most of them are clinging by their fingertips to their mission, to what it is that they’re doing; so they don’t really have the means to develop meaningful volunteer projects, although obviously every one of them could use it.

“The first part of our year is helping to develop projects, helping to teach them how they might effectively use volunteers, giving them ideas and finding out what their needs are, and seeing how we can
fit the two pieces together,” she added.

Bridge Week is a carefully-planned project that takes almost a year to develop. An integral part of the process is letting the volunteers understand exactly what sort of contribution they are making to their particular assigned agency.

“One of the things that we ask of every one of [the agencies] is that they spend the first few minutes of each project telling their volunteers what their mission is, what their challenges are, why they were created, and how what’s going to happen will tie in to that,” Chin said.

By explaining how their participation will affect the agency and the people it serves, volunteers come away from Bridge Week with a deep sense of contribution to their project.

“Every single year, we have more and more of our nonprofits saying to us that this is so fabulous; it’s very encouraging to our employees and our staff that there are people out there that will come in and spend their time,” Chin said. “We’re not just check writers, there’s faces to us. For the nonprofits to understand that and to acknowledge that was a big step.”

For more information on IICF, please visit www.iicf.com.

Topics California