IICF Celebrates 10 Years of Charitable Giving

The Insurance Industry Charitable Fund (IICF) recently marked their 10th year anniversary at their annual Gala celebration, held this year at the San Francisco City Hall.

Over the past 10 years, the IICF has evolved as an organization, making its mark not only in the insurance industry, but also in the lives of the many non-profit organizations it has supported and given its time to.

With its roots in Northern California, the IICF, founded in 1994, has grown to encompass the entire state of California, serving various charities in need. The IICF has donated over 50,000 volunteer hours since its inception of IICF Bridge Week in 1998, a weeklong program held each October in which employees from companies donate their time to help out a specific non-profit organization. In addition, it further garners industry support through its annual Gala.

“The IICF has transitioned itself in the past 10 years. Evolving from a very small group of locally focused insurance executives who raised less than a hundred thousand dollars a year and gave it all to a single charity, it has become a large industry-wide association professionally run by an executive director with all the various committees and benchmarks necessary to raise between a million and a million and a half a year that’s given to a broad-based group of charities,” Bruce Basso, ex-officio chairman of the IICF, and chairman of ABD Insurance Services, said. “[It] is a very highly motivated and professionally run insurance organization that deals with charitable giving for the entire insurance industry.”

Donating over $5.5 million in grants in its 10-year history, the IICF “grew out of the need that the founders saw in increasing the visibility of the insurance industry,” CEO Karen Chin said. In attempts to broaden the public’s view of the insurance industry, the founders of the IICF, Jim Woods, Bruce Basso, Fred Dopfel, Howard Kalt, Bob Lewis, Roy Pasini, Bruce MacCready, Marc Corsi and Russell Miller created the organization in hopes of bringing to light the positive contributions of the industry.

Initially, the IICF was created because the need was evident to expand the scope of the industry’s donations and presence into local communities. “The change was necessary because the insurance industry itself wanted to represent itself as a focused philanthrophic group and wanted to represent itself to a broader spectrum of charities and bring more value to the communities to which it operates,” Basso said. “Giving all our charitable dollars to one entity is counterproductive to improving the way the insurance industry is perceived in the state.”

Now serving over 100 different non-profit organizations, the IICF continues to remain selective in choosing which programs to become involved in. As Chin explained, a number of the programs the IICF is involved in are grants that the IICF has actually created. “In most cases, these are programs that may not exist without our participation,” she said. “These are things that the industry can feel proud about. These are things that we have researched; we have put in the time and energy to work with a non-profit to actually make it happen.”

Chin said that each year, IICF’s donors recommend specific charities as potential grant recipients. Chin and her staff then research the organization on its own merits to determine whether or not the IICF can have an effect.

Lynn Anderson, president of the Epidermolysis Bullosa Medical Research Foundation (EBMRF), has seen the benefits of the contributions from the IICF first-hand. Anderson estimates that over the years, the IICF has donated about $75,000 towards epidermolysis bullosa (EB) research, which is a rare skin disease affecting approximately 100,000 Americans.

In addition, the IICF is credited as EBMRF’s first corporate sponsor. “With the help of IICF donations, researchers at Stanford University think they may be on the cusp of testing a genetic cure for the disease,” Chin said. “This is so important because it may directly affect the fact that most EB patients die within the first year, and those who survive seldom live beyond age 30, and are in pain every moment of their lives.”

Anderson is grateful to the IICF for its contributions, and pointed out that because EB affects such a small percentage of Americans, oftentimes it goes unnoticed by larger funding entities. In addition, she said, pharmaceutical companies don’t usually invest money into finding a cure for the disease, since there are so few people affected by it. This what sets the IICF apart from other charitable organizations; in many cases it seeks out underserved charities that are in need of support, both financially and physically.

“This is a fabulous program, because not only do they encourage people to give their resources financially, but they also encourage them to give their time and commit their hearts to these programs,” Anderson added.

Anderson’s reference to IICF Bridge Week volunteers is typical of the “added value” that comes with IICF grants, according to Chin. “As IICF recipients, non-profits truly appreciate the chance to have individuals and companies learn more about their work first hand through IICF Bridge Week. One result of this is that many non-profits continue to see these volunteers return throughout the year. The companies benefit, too,” Chin said, “because their employees get to ‘experience’ the company’s commitment to charitable involvement, get to team-build and also become educated about real-life challenges and community support systems.”

Recently, the IICF teamed up with the Starbright Foundation, a non-profit organization headed up by Hollywood filmmaker Stephen Spielberg that is charged with developing projects to empower seriously ill children. According to Janet Kidd, IICF regional vice president, the IICF gave the foundation a grant to print and distribute, at no charge, a comic book series—X-Men in: Life Lessons, featuring the popular X-Men characters. With the help of Marvel Comics, the series is designed to address specific issues children with burn injuries might face.

Kidd said the series aims at the children’s inner resources so they should not have their life be defined as a burn victim. “They still have goals and can lead productive, fulfilling lives. They can get beyond their burns. We were so struck by that,” she added.

The books will be distributed at burn centers nationwide, and also at summer camps designed specifically for burn victims.

For more information on the IICF or to learn how to become an IICF Bridge Week participant, visit www.iicf.org or call (626) 963-7215 or (510) 208-0833.

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