As 2022 concludes, the business world is facing challenges yet opportunities to shine a light on the positive abound. Continued challenges from the pandemic, inflation and supply chain, talent shortages and catastrophic weather events have impacted businesses and people across the country. Despite these challenges, the insurance industry continues to stand tall as a dependable leader for our communities and a catalyst of resilience and hope.

Through the challenges of the past few years, our industry has continued to demonstrate a strong commitment to charitable giving and philanthropy. Just look at our numbers at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. insurers and charitable foundations donated roughly $280 million during the pandemic's early days, with the larger international insurance community contributing another $150 million, according to data from the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF) and the Insurance Information Institute (III).

While it's too early to estimate this year's annual total giving numbers for the insurance industry, that commitment to giving has certainly persisted in 2022. In fact, in June 2023, IICF will publish its first Insurance Industry Philanthropic Index, a new resource that will provide a measurement of industrywide volunteerism and paint a detailed picture of the year in giving. This will include total volunteer hours of service by insurance professionals, the number of volunteers, total funds invested and granted into the community and the total number of nonprofit partners supported in the community. This measurement tool will not only be valuable in demonstrating the good we've done as an industry, but also in recruiting the next generation, who have voiced a desire to work within industries and for businesses that give back and encourage and enable their employees to do the same.