Conservation United believes that a broker is first and foremost a partner and resource to help your organization avoid accidents, injuries, incidents, and ultimately claims. A passive broker with regard to risk management is simply a middle man, not a true resource to the nonprofit and conservation industries. Drawing on Chris Baker’s decades of field and management experience in the conservation industry, supported by Robert Johnston’s decades of experience is risk/management and risk transfer for the construction and conservation industries, CU has founded the Conservation Safety Program, offering the following services at no cost to the organizations we serve:
- Free Safety Consultation: Conservation United has developed a 50 point safety consultation checklist applicable to any conservation organization, and easily adapted to any nonprofit. We perform a free site visit with our client’s operations, safety, and human resources staff to identify your organization’s current practices and to identify areas of improvement.
- Free Template HR Manuals/Policies, Contracts, etc.: Conservation United invests heavily in a service created by a team of over 50 labor and employment attorneys who continuously update policy manuals, educational materials, posters, sample contract language, etc. If you need a draft of contract for your drivers, CU will provide one for your review. If your organization needs to enhance its whistleblower policy, privacy policy, harassment and molestation policy, or even develop an employee manual from scratch, Conservation United will provide up to date materials vetted by a team of attorneys at absolutely no cost for current clients, or for a small fee to any nonprofit.
- Connect to Field Skills Training Specialists: By aggregating similar organizations in our portfolio, Conservation United is connected to the best practices and the best practitioner in the industry. We are often able to connect organizations to driver safety trainers specific to vans, 4WD vehicles, or other large passenger vehicles. We are completely informed of USFS and other federal agency chainsaw training standards, and can help you connect to the best industry chainsaw training and certification.
- Sharing Data: Conservation United is adamant about protecting your privacy, but is also in a unique position to aggregate losses and collect incident reports from among hundreds of conservation organizations. We analyze the cause of injuries and other losses and share lessons among our family of clients. The perspective and lessons gained from the experiences of dozens of similar organizations provides a multi-fold increase in your opportunities to learn and prevent.
- Facilitate Carrier Safety Visits: The majority of nonprofit organizations are unaware of the vast array of safety and risk management resources available to them through their insurance carriers. Carriers often provide free access to risk management consultants, HR attorneys, OSHA specialists, trainers for back injury prevention, etc. Conservation United is fully engaged with our carriers and will help connect your organization to an assigned safety specialist. We also cut through the myth that a carrier’s safety inspection represents an adversarial event for your organization. We work with carriers that genuinely want to be proactive partners in helping your organization avoid claims, not ones that use an invited safety visit as an excuse to raise rates or issue non-renewals. Conservation United will serve as your guide mapping out resources to help you function as safety and efficiently as possible.
Two-Year Workers Comp Experience Modification Reduction Challenge
Occasionally, Conservation United is unable to place organizations with the best workers compensation carriers due to a single large injury/claim, a large volume of small claims, or both. In such cases, we are still available as a Risk Management Consultant under a unique program designed to limit frequency and severity of losses, help lower your experience modification, and ultimately save premium while preventing injury. We charge no fee for our services up front. However, if and when we succeed in helping you lower your Experience Modification and then help you leave your state’s “assigned risk” program, CU will charge a fee equal to 5 percent of your savings on the first year of premium. If we cannot help lower your experience modification, or we cannot place your policy with a carrier outside assigned risk, there will be no charge for our services.