YMCA Management Webinar Series: Program Structures

These are the standard coverages we typically see for YMCAs. While policy names may vary slightly, these should look familiar:

General Liability
General liability covers bodily injury and certain personal claims arising from YMCA operations, including slips, trips, falls and other third-party claims. It is important to understand exactly what is included in your policy and to confirm whether any emerging restrictions or sublimits apply in higher risk areas.

Abuse and Molestation Coverage
Abuse and molestation coverage remains one of the most critical protections for YMCAs due to childcare, aquatics and youth-facing programming, including peer-to-peer exposure. This coverage is designed to help address allegations involving misconduct, abuse or harassment by staff, volunteers or participants and can help cover legal fees, settlements and damages.

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Workers’ Compensation
Workers’ compensation provides coverage for employees injured on the job, including medical expenses, rehabilitation and lost wages. A key cost driver is time away from work, making return-to-work practices and claim management essential.

As you evaluate workers’ compensation strategy, consider:
• Whether you have a return-to-work program that helps employees transition back safely.
• How deductibles or retentions may impact total cost of risk.
• How experience modification and claim trends affect renewal pricing.

Property Insurance
Property insurance protects YMCA-owned buildings, equipment and other property against risks such as fire, theft, vandalism and certain natural disasters, depending on policy structure and endorsements. In today’s environment, property coverage has become tougher to place due to severe weather events and loss trends.

Key practical steps include:
• Reviewing valuations and confirming limits reflect current replacement costs.
• Ensuring new equipment and improvements are scheduled appropriately.
• Verifying deductibles and catastrophe provisions (including convective storm/hail in many regions).

Business Income Considerations
Business income coverage is often misunderstood. It generally applies only when triggered by a covered peril that causes physical damage. COVID-era shutdowns were not considered physical damage and courts largely agreed with insurers’ interpretation. Many property policies now also contain tighter contagious disease endorsements or exclusions that can limit coverage for shutdowns tied to outbreaks (including scenarios like illness-related closures in camps).

While non-physical damage business income coverage can sometimes be purchased, it is often prohibitively expensive and should be evaluated carefully for cost-benefit.

Auto Insurance
Auto insurance covers YMCA-owned vehicles (transport vans, maintenance vehicles and fleet vehicles) as well as hired and non-owned auto exposures (such as staff using personal vehicles for business tasks or renting vehicles for trips).

The auto insurance market has experienced sustained pressure over the last several years, driven largely by liability trends, including higher plaintiff demands and nuclear verdict exposure. Even as physical damage accounts for a large share of auto premium dollars, liability is the primary driver of rate pressure.

One important consideration for YMCA leaders: General liability policies contain auto exclusions, so it is critical to confirm whether auto policies contain abuse exclusions. If abuse is excluded in the auto policy, it raises practical coverage questions for scenarios involving incidents in vehicles, even when general liability includes abuse coverage.

D&O and Employment Practices Liability
Directors & Officers (D&O) insurance protects directors, officers and board members against claims arising from governance decisions. Most YMCA programs also include Employment Practices Liability (EPL), which covers issues such as wrongful termination, discrimination and sexual harassment claims.

Two exclusions or risk areas often worth reviewing are:

• Biometric data exclusions (such as fingerprint scanning or similar access technologies).
• Wage and hour exposure, which can be costly to defend due to accounting and audit requirements even when settlements are limited.

Since YMCAs operate in complex community environments and make governance decisions tied to facilities, programming and community standards, D&O remains a critical protection.

Cyber and Crime

Cyber Insurance helps protect against data breaches, ransomware and other cyber incidents. It can also support response costs such as credit monitoring and remediation and may include risk management tools such as tabletop exercises to test preparedness. Cyber events are increasingly common and can originate from routine email or system activity.

Crime Insurance helps address theft, fraud, embezzlement, forgery, unauthorized transactions, employee dishonesty and social engineering schemes. Social engineering coverage is commonly sublimited, so leaders should understand how much is available within the crime policy and whether additional capacity can be layered through cyber markets if appropriate.

Umbrella and Excess Liability Coverage
Umbrella and excess liability coverage provides protection above primary coverage limits for larger claims. The market for excess liability has tightened in recent years, especially for abuse exposures.

A key principle emphasized in the session: Lower umbrella limits do not prevent plaintiff demands, and reducing total limits purely due to constraints around abuse coverage can leave other exposures under protected. Even when abuse capacity is limited, there may still be economical excess coverage available for other exposures.

This distinction is a major challenge in the current market, particularly as standalone abuse policies have increasingly been offered on a claims-made basis.

Occurrence Policies
Occurrence coverage responds based on when the incident occurred, even if the claim is reported years later. Limits from the policy year of the occurrence remain available for that claim.

Claims-Made Policies
Claims-made coverage responds when the claim is made and reported during the policy period. It generally requires continuous coverage. If claims-made coverage is discontinued, prior years may become uninsured unless an extended reporting period (“tail”) is purchased.

Claims-made policies may be an available solution in a constrained abuse market, but they come with operational consequences that must be managed carefully. One key point: Claims-made premiums typically ramp over the first several years (often around five) as the policy accumulates exposure history, even if loss experience remains stable.

For YMCAs considering standalone claims-made abuse coverage, it is essential to understand continuity requirements, tail provisions and how switching back to occurrence coverage could create unintended gaps.

Many YMCAs are navigating a difficult dynamic: increasing premiums paired with reduced limits or tighter terms. One lever available in some placements is the use of deductibles or retentions, but these must be evaluated through a total cost of risk lens.

Key considerations include:

• The premium credit offered versus the increased out-of-pocket risk.
• Historical claims frequency and severity within the deductible layer.
• Whether higher deductibles meaningfully impact pricing for tougher liability claims (often requiring higher retentions to move the needle).
• The operational readiness to manage claims and funding responsibility when losses occur.

Retentions can help in certain scenarios, but they require thoughtful planning and strong internal processes for reporting, documentation and claims handling.