Every year, the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation runs its eight-day Week of Giving—where insurance professionals from all over the country join up with nonprofit organizations to volunteer in their communities.
This year, Kristen Nevins from Direct Connection Advertising & Marketing volunteered to help serve meals at Father Joe’s Village in downtown San Diego. While there, Kristen met up with the team from Insurance Journal, as well as a group of volunteers from Berkshire Hathaway’s Southern California team.
The city of San Diego has the fourth largest population of people affected by homelessness in the United States, and the second largest population of homeless veterans. Father Joe’s provides homeless and needy families and individuals with temporary housing, food and emergency services, and more.
The IICF Week of Giving is active throughout 173 cities in the United States as well as the United Kingdom. Altogether, participants perform over 270,000 hours of service throughout the week.
The organization also runs the IICF Early Literacy Initiative, which partners with Sesame Workshop to produce the “Every Day is a Reading and Writing Day” program—offering free bilingual reading and multimedia resources for children ages 5 and under in economically underserved communities.
“We worked specifically in the family kitchens, feeding underprivileged families with young kids who live in apartments at Father Joe’s center,” said Kristen. “It was really nice to see how appreciative everyone was that we came to volunteer and serve dinner.”
For Kristen, this was especially meaningful—because it was Direct Connection Advertising & Marketing’s first time participating in the Week of Giving. “Visiting Father Joe’s with other insurance professionals gave me a chance to reflect on how blessed we are to work in this amazing community with such great people,” she says. “I can’t wait to go back again sometime soon.”
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