Insurance, Sports Pros Gather at Tri-State Charitable Foundation Dinner

More than 800 insurance professionals from the tri-state area and two All-Star athletes channeled their competitive energies last night to raise $1.1 million for charities.

The New York division of the Insurance Industry Charitable Foundation (IICF), which works to combine insurance industry charitable giving, held its annual benefit dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City where it announced the eight recipients of this year’s IICF grants.

Baseball star Ken Griffey, Jr. and hockey legend Mark Messier were on hand to thank IICF for supporting their favorite charities: the Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Griffey’s case and, in Messier’s, the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation.

The other New York, New Jersey and Connecticut area groups receiving IICF grants this year are the Boys Hope Girls Hope New York, Community Mainstreaming Associates, Covenant House, Clearwater, Starlight Children’s Foundation and World Cares Center.

The 2010 dinner honoree was Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, chairman and CEO of C.V. Starr & Co., Inc., who also chairs the Starr Foundation, a major philanthropic organization in its own right and a supporter of the IICF. Greenberg is the former chairman and CEO of American International Group.

The guest speaker was former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani who praised Greenberg as a “remarkable American patriot” and blasted former Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s efforts to prosecute Greenberg as “one of the great outrages in American legal history.”

More than 130 major insurance companies, brokerages, organizations and service firms support the IICF. They include Liberty Mutual, Tower Group Companies, Crump, Ironshore, Hub International Northeast, Lloyd’s, Lockton, Aon Benfield, Marsh & McLennan, Willis, Chartis, Chubb, ACE Group, Munich Re, Swiss Re, CNA, Towers Watson, Travelers and Zurich.

The IICF was established in 1994 and since its inception has contributed more than $16 million in grants to charities and 140,000 volunteer hours to hundreds of community non-profit organizations.