A Team Rubicon professional assisting refugees from Russia’s war on Ukraine
Earlier this year, Palomar announced its commitment to Team Rubicon, an innovative NGO that leverages the skillsets of military veterans, first responders, and civilian volunteers to assist communities across the nation in the immediate aftermath of human and environmental crises. Our program, called Palomar Protects™, devotes a percentage of Palomar’s earned premiums on our catastrophe policies to fund Team Rubicon’s response operations. By buying a Palomar policy, customers can directly support their neighbors in their time of greatest need. Insurance agents can help build more resilient communities by selling a Palomar policy.
We teamed up with Team Rubicon because Palomar is keenly aware of natural disasters’ human and economic costs. We see a natural synergy between our work protecting home and business owners with catastrophe insurance and TR’s recovery and repair efforts. Recently, though, Team Rubicon has garnered international attention for its heroic work in response to man-made disasters, including Afghans’ massive dislocation following ongoing conflict and the Taliban’s seizure of power, and Russia’s war on Ukraine. Palomar is equally proud to support these efforts, which leverage American tenacity and generosity on behalf of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Since last fall, Team Rubicon has partnered with the US Department of State to provide Afghan refugee families with move-in assistance and necessary household items. TR’s volunteers stock and manage warehouses for these items, which are critical to a refugee population with little familiarity with the US and precious little disposable income. TR has served a total of more than 1,900 Afghani refugees and helped 515 Afghan families move into housing in the United States. You can learn more about TR’s efforts supporting refugees at https://teamrubiconusa.org/resettlement and more about the broad, national effort at https://welcome.us/partners#welcome-coalition.
More recently, Team Rubicon has deployed near the front lines of Russia’s war on Ukraine to provide critical humanitarian assistance to the enormous Ukrainian refugee population. According to the United Nations, approximately 5.7 million people have fled that country seeking safety in neighboring countries, including Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and Slovakia. As many as 7.8 million more Ukrainians are unable to leave Ukraine at present but will soon add to the stream of refugees from this awful war. Team Rubicon professional staff are deployed throughout this region and in Western Ukraine itself to provide patient care and emergency medical needs. Pursuant to US policy, as many as 100,000 of these refugees will eventually be welcomed into our nation, and we look forward to supporting those relocation efforts as they occur.
Palomar and Team Rubicon remain focused on the mission of serving American communities impacted by catastrophe. We are once again poised for a year of record damage from floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfire, and Palomar is prepared to fulfill our commitment to our customers so that they might rebuild and resume normalcy as quickly as possible. We believe in strong American communities, and we will continue to invest in innovative solutions that bring us closer to this objective. We hope and expect that our new neighbors from Ukraine and Afghanistan will help us become stronger still. We welcome them and extend our thanks to Team Rubicon and the network of companies, government officials, and NGOs working tirelessly to make a difference in their lives.
