Summary

The Hub is thrilled to feature InnSure in the Winter 2025 issue of Partner Perspectives, a quarterly column highlighting the strategic, collaborative work done alongside one of CHEER’s 25 diverse partners.

Partner Type: Practitioner

Year of Establishment: 2019

Headquarters: Boston, MA

Mission: Using Innovative Approaches to Catalyze a Bold and Decisive Insurance Industry Response to Climate Change

The Hub’s community partners provide CHEER boots-on-the-ground perspective of its case study areas. They help describe the lived experiences, coping, and decision-making of community members to ensure that CHEER’s computational framework is based on research outcomes that are aligned with community-defined goals. This will support community members in making well-informed decisions to manage their risk. Read on to learn about InnSure important work alongside the Hub.

 

A Word From the Director

Charlie Sidoti (he/him)

Charlie Sidoti is the founder and executive director of InnSure. His 35+ years of experience in the insurance industry includes underwriting, engineering, and risk management-related leadership roles with P&C insurance carriers and leading risk assessment-focused insurtech startups. He has also served on the board of the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), another CHEER practitioner partner.

“Insurance has a long history of doing amazing work to help people manage the risks that threaten their future success. Now more than ever insurance experts will need to step up individually and collectively to help people respond to climate change-related risks – the greatest challenges we’ve ever faced. This is what the industry was designed to do. This is what gets me up every day.”

The Mission and Vision

InnSure is an innovation hub that works to combat climate change through climate-friendly insurance solutions by providing financial protection, supporting communities, and mitigating risks. The non-profit organization is rooted in the belief that insurance is a very efficient tool to finance risk and plays a crucial role in tackling climate change. InnSure seeks to make coverage more affordable, accessible, and widely adopted. They work with a variety of stakeholders – such as start ups, grassroots organizations, local governments, insurance industry corporates, and investors – and provide support through a variety of services, including consulting, education, and collaboration. By connecting these groups with the necessary resources and expertise, InnSure is uncovering new and creative ways for the insurance industry to make a positive impact on the planet.

Working with the Hub 

InnSure, which joined CHEER as a practitioner partner in 2024, and the Hub share a fundamental belief: the current plan for managing and mitigating climate risks is ineffective. This consensus is where Hub’s computational framework, the Stakeholder-based Tool for the Analysis of Regional Risk (STARR), and InnSure’s work intersect. InnSure has developed a Climate Risk and Insurance Sandbox (CRIS) where insurance companies can use climate-relevant data to test their loss models, and the team is exploring ways for STARR and CRIS to improve one another. 

InnSure is piloting innovative approaches to “community-embedded” insurance,” where an insurance policy covers an entire community so the financial burden is spread over more homes and the cost to individuals is lower. This type of innovation opens up new ways for practice partners, like InnSure, to collaborate with CHEER community partners, further strengthening the entire project. 

Looking Forward

InnSure plans to eventually incorporate the Hub’s modeling into its Total Cost or Risk decision framework, the goal of which is to help communities make better decisions around optimizing investment into risk reduction and risk transfer. Specifically, this collaboration aims to empower community leaders to more effectively intervene in local insurance markets in ways that quantify and capture the value of adaptation investment more quickly and more fully for stakeholders in the community. 

Getting Involved

To learn more about InnSure, visit their website or the Hub’s Partners page.