We are a company that exists to make a difference, not simply to make a profit. As our mission statement explicitly states, we aim to improve the quality of life in the communities we serve. We accomplish this in our Insurance Program for YMCAs, our Insurance Program for JCOs and our Insurance Program for Dentists in a number of exciting ways.

Not a Typical Insurance Company
In our Insurance Program for YMCAs, we have taken a pro-active role in changing our clients behavior in order to reduce their exposure to risk and to ensure the safety of the their constituencies. YMCAs bear the mission to “Build strong children, strong families, and strong communities.” We aid in this mission by traveling to YMCAs across the country to conduct safety trainings for program and camp staff and to inspect facilities for safety. During the summer of 2005, we trained over 18,000 camp counselors at YMCAs across the country, in our effort to create the safest possible camp experience for the children of the 330+ YMCA associations that we serve. We also conduct more than 400 unannounced aquatic audits annually, making our YMCA pools some of the safest in the country. Because of these efforts, we have seen a marked decrease in incidents and injuries at YMCAs, YMCA camps and YMCA aquatic facilities. We see the safety of children at YMCAs across the country as our personal responsibility – which we take very seriously.

In 2004, we also took a bold and proactive measure to ensure the safety of children across the country, by stepping out of line with the rest of the industry and announcing a plan to phase out insurance coverage of 12 and 15 passenger vans for YMCAs. We have found, through past company experience and regimented government safety tests that 15 passenger vans pose a substantially greater risk to their occupants, both in terms of their propensity for rollover and their inability to withstand side impact. We are therefore leveraging our position as the leading insurance provider for YMCAs across the country, to change behavior and keep kids out of these dangerous vehicles.

In our Insurance Program for Dentists, we provide professional liability insurance to dentists – many of them hard-to-insure – across the country. Many of the dentists we serve provide services to inner-city communities that would lack dental coverage if we were not able to provide their dentists with comprehensive liability insurance at a reasonable price.

As with the YMCA program, we have taken bold steps in changing the behaviors of dentists, both those we cover and those we do not, by providing information to them on risk factors by region through programmatic newsletters, internet correspondence, and our website. We have also tried to affect change in their dental practice characteristics through our educational seminars and dental conference presentations to practicing dentists and dental students. We are ADA CERP certified and are a source of mandatory continuing education for many dentists across the country.

These bold steps are just a few examples of our unorthodox approach to insurance and to business. In many ways we are not a typical company, we approach our clients and our business partners with our minds sharp and our hearts open. We understand that in order to make a difference in the communities we serve, we have to be a solvent, financially profitable company. Our challenge is to find the balance between our own profitability and the needs of our clients to have affordable, maintainable insurance coverage. This is all a part of our greater mission to better the lives of those living in the communities we serve, including our own.

Businesses for Social Responsibility
Redwoods has recently become a member of Businesses for Social Responsibility (www.bsr.org): an organization that helps companies of all sizes and sectors to achieve success in ways that demonstrate respect for ethical values, people, communities and the environment.