At Insular Life, we have always taken pride in demonstrating our core values as a company. Among them is how we honor God by touching lives through sharing our financial, human, and intellectual resources to fellow Filipinos.
The impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic is both devastating and profound — from the staggering number of lives lost, to the many more threatened and disrupted. We continue to grapple with uncertainty and change to this day.
However dire, the pandemic gave us another opportunity to demonstrate and live our mission. It came at a time when Insular Foundation has turned 51 and received a validation for the work that we do with a recognition from the Asia CEO Awards as “CSR Company of the Year.”
Never has the Foundation played a bigger frontline role at inLife than in 2020. It became the face, presence, and direct helpline of InLife to the communities impacted heavily by the pandemic.
Notwithstanding their own personal struggles with the pandemic, our employees and agents still responded to the needs of our countrymen. Demonstrating their sense of malasakit and generosity, they extended financial and in-kind assistance to those in need. This led to the highest amount of donations from employees and the agency force we have ever raised, which reflects the heightened sense of social responsibility of InLifers.
Aside from acting as financial stewards for the donations, the Foundation also served as the “arms and feet” of InLifers who were under lockdown restrictions and unable to do physical volunteer work onsite. The Foundation bravely took on this challenging task while safeguarding their own health.
Our humanitarian response
Even before the COVID-19 public health crisis started, the Foundation was already thrust into the frontlines for disaster response and rehabilitation efforts.
In January 2020, we launched Project Taal Campaign to help the families displaced by the Taal Volcano eruptions. We raised a total of P1.9 million in cash donations, of which P844,838 came from our employees and agents. The balance came from the Foundation as a way of matching their donations by 1.25 times. A total of 750 families from the municipalities of Taal, Sta. Rita, and Padre Pio, received the donations in the form of hygiene kits, eating utensils, beddings, blankets, and towels. We also extended humanitarian assistance to those severely affected by typhoons Rolly and Ulysses that came later in the year.
Barely two months after our Project Taal Campaign, the COVID-19 became a global pandemic. Our Foundation immediately sprang into action and again pooled contributions from employees, agents, families, and friends of InLife and its subsidiary, Insular Health Care, Inc. This massive fundraising effort, which started on March 22, 2020, was made to address the most urgent need at the time: to provide our medical workers who are leading the fight against COVID-19 with personal protective equipment, hygiene kits, and food.
InLife also provided free insurance coverage to 550 health workers of Medical City, Lung Center of the Philippines, and Capitol Medical Center.
Three months after the government enforced an Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), the lockdown restrictions eased and allowed essential industries to open. Delivery service workers, and personnel in supermarkets, gasoline stores, utility and energy companies, and the like became front liners as well. As such, they were the most vulnerable to the spread of the virus, and yet did not have life insurance. InLife again saw it as an opportunity to make a difference.
What started as a fundraising effort for medical front liners has snowballed into a bigger Chain of Protection program, giving free life insurance and hospitalization allowance to 110,000 essential workers. The campaign was designed so the beneficiaries can forward the offer to their family, officemates, and friends who also belong to the identified essential industries, thus creating a “chain of protection.”
Cash donations were also given to the Philippine Nurses Association Cebu Chapter, Inc.; Clark Investors and Locators Association, Inc.; Metro Angeles Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Inc.; and UST Hospital, while food, kitchen equipment, toiletries, and other basic supplies were provided to the Ospital ng Muntinlupa front liners.
These COVID-19-related efforts were funded with the P9.1 million raised from the donations of InLife employees and agents while external donors contributed P1.6 million. Of the total funds raised, P5 million was allotted for the Chain of Protection Program, which is extended until November 2021 when InLife turns 111 years old.
