Three Decades of Giving

In 2008, the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation asked 60 nonprofit agencies for which it had provided volunteers or funding to provide feedback on the level of service in these partnerships.

Sixteen years later, Foundation CEO Bill Ross still remembers two particular survey responses. One nonprofit told the survey: “I never realized the insurance industry has a heart.”

“For me,” says Ross, who had been CEO for just four years at that point, “that was a good measurement that we’re really reaching an audience and having them understand better who the insurance industry really is.” The second response that made an impression addressed the unexpected collaboration among insurance professionals, more typically seen as dogged rivals, on behalf of the communities they serve. As Ross recalls, the message affirmed an important message that he preaches routinely. “Some people look at the industry and say, ‘All they do is compete with each other and they don’t care about anything else,’” he says. “And that’s not true really. This industry is actually quite good at collaboration.”

During his 20-year tenure as head of the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF), Ross has seen that collaboration at work on one project after another. In fact, as the foundation celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, it has delivered over $50 million in community grants that have supported more than 1,000 nonprofit organizations across the United States and the United Kingdom. Foundation members have collectively amassed nearly 340,000 volunteer hours.

Over the course of three decades, the IICF has proven to be a hands-on foundation that does not stand still; one that can, as circumstances merit, pivot in entirely new directions to meet a community’s most urgent needs.

“The insurance industry has some amazing leaders,” Ross says. “And those leaders, one way or another, seem to gravitate toward the IICF.”

Modest Origins

The foundation’s place in the nonprofit world is perhaps best appreciated by considering its modest origins in San Francisco. Sometime around 1990, a group of seven or eight insurance professionals got together to organize an annual charitable event, the Northern California Insurance Industry Dinner. They sold a few hundred tickets to individual buyers and raised about $60,000 for City of Hope, a cancer research organization.

Among the group’s founders was Bruce Basso, who then headed ABD Insurance and Financial Services in Redwood City, California, and would later become CEO of the Worldwide Broker Network. Basso led a push to create an insurance industry charity that would be less driven by individual donations and more by insurance carriers, agents, brokers, and legal firms purchasing tables to the annual fundraising gala for $5,000 or $10,000 and supporting the volunteer efforts coordinated by the charity. In 1994, with help from attorney and early supporter Jim Woods, the charity formed its own 501 (c)(3) nonprofit, to be known as the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation.

“I said, ‘Look, we are going to change the whole vision of the charity and we’re going to go into the corporate world, the insurance carriers, and various associated firms,” Basso recalls, “and build this into a real insurance industry charitable fund.’”

At the same time, the foundation began donating money to nonprofit organizations beyond solely City of Hope.

“We felt we would be much more effective on our own,” Basso says, “and it turns out we were.”

The first order of business was hiring Karen Chin to lead the new organization. Chin, who had a background in public relations and community development, steered the IICF through its critical first decade of growth. “When we started in the corporate direction and we had an executive director,” Basso says, “the number of people that came out of the industry to join in the effort was tremendous.”

When Chin stepped down in 2004, the foundation turned to Ross, who had recently retired from a 31-year career with Walt Disney. Ross quickly expanded the organization beyond its California roots. Within three years the foundation had opened a Northeast Division, headquartered in New York City. “That changed the whole way we looked at ourselves,” Basso says, “because now we were a national organization.”

The foundation has expanded dramatically since then, a growth reflected in its revenue-generating prowess. Besides annual fundraising galas, it also organizes regional forums and other programs that each year attract thousands of participants.

The Northeast Division’s first fundraising dinner, in December 2007, raised more than $1 million. With just two exceptions, the division’s annual gala has matched that mark every year since.

In 2011, the IICF opened its Midwest Division, based in Chicago. The following year the foundation was looking to create a new division based in Dallas. Basso approached Bill Henry, hoping he could help lead the effort. But Henry, then chairman of Marsh McLennan’s Southwest Region, was a tough sell: “I said, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’” Basso persisted, and eventually Henry became the founding chairman of the foundation’s Southeast Division. “Nobody can say no to Bruce Basso,” Henry says.

Henry himself is no slouch at persuasion. In 2015, after several years of trying, he succeeded in convincing former U.S. President George W. Bush to speak at the Southeast Division’s annual Lone Star Legends Benefit Dinner. Henry interviewed the former commander in chief on stage that night. “He was unbelievably funny. He was unbelievably intelligent,” Henry says. “He stole the show, by far.”

Henry says he seized on the opportunity to engage his insurance colleagues in a goodwill project designed to enhance the very communities they serve. “I love our industry,” Henry says. “The idea of us getting together, as competitors and vendors and carriers, and giving back to the community, was really enticing. I think our industry gets a terrible rap from the public. Maybe this could demonstrate that we’re not the bad guys, we’re the good guys.”

In 2015, the foundation formed its first international division, in the United Kingdom. And three years ago it formed a division focused on the insurance industry’s life and wealth management segment, the organization’s first division devoted to a product line rather than a region. Alisa Faust Breese, the vice president of communications for the IICF, describes the Life Division as “a national division with potential international opportunities.”

Today the foundation works with 400 insurance companies and related businesses across its six divisions, which in total operate nine chapters in major cities in each region. Over the 20 years of Ross’s tenure, IICF staff has grown from two to 14, while its board membership has ballooned from 12 to nearly 800.

“If I look at starting with 12 and going to 800,” Ross says, “there are name after name after name of just amazing men and women who contribute to this industry, who make it a better industry. Just amazing people and leaders that are generous of their time, of their talent and of their wealth.”

Focused Philanthropy

Each IICF division maintains a grants committee that charts the direction of the division’s charitable giving. The Southeast Division, for example, has embraced programs designed for military veterans. The Northeast Division has funded environmental programs. The grants committees submit recommendations to each division’s board of directors, which has the final say on funding decisions.

Over its 30-year history, the IICF has consistently focused its philanthropic efforts on two causes in particular: education and children. In 2016, the foundation partnered with Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street, to develop the Early Literacy Initiative, an extensive literacy program, for children 3 to 5 years old, that provided resources for educators, community providers, and IICF literacy volunteers. The initiative grew out of the foundation’s concern over the wide gap in literacy rates between children from high- and low-income households. Among its programs was a free multimedia program called Every Day is a Reading and Writing Day, which included videos, online resources, and guides for young children and their parents and caregivers. The program distributed 100,000 free copies of a bilingual (English and Spanish) storybook, Book Buddies, to children in underserved communities.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, the IICF responded by forming the Children’s Relief Fund, which raised $1.8 million and provided 3 million meals to needy children and their families in the United States and the United Kingdom. That campaign continues today, Ross says, as part of the foundation’s anniversary celebration, with the IICF working with dozens of nonprofit partners in both countries. “All the efforts of the 30th anniversary and raising funds will go to support food insecurities for children in the U.S. and U.K.,” he says, “and we hope to raise enough money that we’ll add another 3 million meals being provided.”

While the Children’s Relief Fund focuses on fighting food insecurity and providing meals to vulnerable children and their families, in the United Kingdom it also provides educational resources for families and children in need.

Basso says thousands of insurance professionals have contributed to the IICF’s success, but he gives special credit to Ross. “He has a presence,” Basso says. “And the team he’s built is phenomenal. He brought a more sophisticated, more professional, broader vision.”

In a full-circle moment that connected the foundation’s humble roots with its present-day prowess, earlier this year the Western Division honored Basso and fellow IICF co-founder Jim Woods at its annual Horizon Award Gala in Los Angeles.

Ross and the IICF show no sign of resting on their considerable laurels. In recent years the foundation launched committees on sustainability and corporate social responsibility. It created the IDEA Council, an acronym for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.

Meanwhile, the IICF continues to look to expand internationally: In 2025 the foundation plans to open a Canada Division, its seventh, to be based in Toronto.

“We’re not an organization that says, ‘We’re happy who we are. We’re not going to grow. We’re not going to change,’” Ross says. “We’re always looking to move forward in the future.