The Human Safety Net: a call for ideas to define our new approach to the community

In 2016 we embarked on a journey to refocus our interventions in the community seeking to make our funds, skills and people have a broader impact and to further strengthen the sense of belonging to the Group by everyone.

The initiative, called The Human Safety Net, wishes to extend our vision Enhancing people’s lives in order to help disadvantaged people overcome difficulties and change their lives and the lives of their families and of the communities in which they live for the better. In particular, we wished to address issues more closely related to demographic and social change.

In order to identify new focus areas we decided to involve our employees from all over the world, allowing us to rely on richness and diversity of perspectives and on employees’ knowledge of the local communities where we operate which an international group such as ours is able to provide. By engaging our leadership into mobilising their teams with an approach differing from one country to another, a call for ideas was launched between December 2015 and February 2016 which raised over 300 proposals, often resulting from the work of several colleagues belonging to different functions working alongside one another.

The project had to meet a number of well defined criteria. The leading criteria were:

• impact and repeatability
• the possibility for Generali to involve its people and their skills and expertise
• innovation and the ability to provide new solutions to already known problems
• the ability to create a chain of people helping people, also through the involvement of our stakeholders to participate and contribute.

The projects were evaluated by a committee made up of people inside and outside the Group, under the guidance of the Group Social Responsibility department. Internally, all Group corporate departments and some country representatives were involved, whereas external third-sector experts helped us to understand which of the projects would better respond to the needs identified and to seek the best partners for their implementation.

In the first months of 2017, the projects will become operational in the first countries that have applied to act as pilot country.