Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield

Philanthropy is “part of our culture” at Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield, President and CEO Curtis Barnett said, and it comes in various forms and from various sources.

In 2001, the nonprofit health insurance carrier created a charitable foundation, the Blue & You Foundation, which has spread almost $40 million to all 75 counties in the state in the form of grants ranging from $5,000 to $150,000 to support health-related projects.

ABCBS also has a corporate giving program independent of the foundation, which donates approximately $1 million a year. The beneficiaries of this giving are mostly health-related, but may also be civil and social programs, Barnett said.

The insurer also has a totally employee-controlled giving program. Employees raise money, sometimes matched by the corporate giving program, for causes selected by an employee committee.

Finally, ABCBS allows employees to use paid time for volunteerism. About 20% of the company’s 3,000 employees gave at least four hours to a volunteer project last year, Barnett said. Volunteerism is not mandatory, he said, but it is encouraged. “It’s something that we feel like is really part of everybody’s job.”

In 2018, Arkansas Blue Cross & Blue Shield celebrated the 70th anniversary of its founding, and the year was marked with a special effort to give back to the state that has supported the company’s growth. The issue employees took on was food insecurity, Barnett said, and the “Fearless Food Fight” project partnered with local communities, colleges and other organizations with a goal of packing 700,000 meals for distribution.

Blue Cross employees blew past the goal, packing more than 1.1 million meals in 2018 and almost 600,000 more in 2019, Barnett said. “It’s a shame that in this day and age we’re having to do that,” he said, but the need was more widespread than he knew.

“We expected that most of that effort would be in the Delta, but we were getting calls from all over the state in areas where you might not expect it,” Barnett said.