BIP Fall 2024

Influential RELATIONSHIPS

Throughout her career, Pat Griffey has been shaped by people and projects that have left a lasting impact on her both personally and professionally.

a lot from them, which helped immensely when the responsibility fell on me for Vision 2025, now simply referred to as the NABIP Strategic Plan.” Don Griffey. Griffey’s husband joined her at Page 1 after she bought the Goodwin agency. “He had been 24 years with a manufacturing firm as director of purchasing. “I said, 'You've got such a great head for finances. This would be a great place for you,'” says Griffey. “We get along extremely well. I thoroughly and completely enjoy working with him. I couldn't be happier.” Pat’s Promise, Inc. Given up for adoption at three years old and subsequently orphaned at 12, Griffey founded the non-profit Pat’s Promise, Inc. PPI works to raise funds and donate to two specific local charities that work with disadvantaged teens. “The ‘promise’ of PPI is not that we can make things better or easier, but that through our two charities, they can find the tools and resources to change their life path,” says Griffey. “I was very blessed to have people who came alongside me at the right times in my life to keep me on a good path, but too many teens today do not have that opportunity. We hope to change that for as many as we can.”

Carol Cutter. Griffey remembers Cutter, a NABIP member from

3 Make friends with the ‘enemy.’ Griffey joined what was then the National Association of Health Underwriters in the mid-1980s. With no local chapter at the time, she would make the three-hour drive to Indianapolis for chapter meetings. One year, Griffey and fellow South Bend, Indiana, Blue Cross Blue Shield GA Larry Sanders decided to drive together to a regional NAHU meeting. "We looked at each other as competitors because of how we were set up. Blue Cross Blue Shield would kind of pit us against each other," says Griffey. "We went to the meeting in suits and found out it was a safari theme when we got there. Halfway through the meeting, Larry said, 'You want to go across the street to the mall to buy some clothes?' And that was the day when Larry and I got along really well." The two closed out the 1990s by hand-selecting agents to start the Greater Northern Indiana NAHU Chapter in South Bend, with Sanders as its first president and Griffey the second president. “Being competitors who came together, it's probably the reason why, for me, NABIP is so important,” says Griffey. “It's the professional relationships. We were fierce competitors against each other, but once we got in the car and got around other people, we realized, hey, we actually kind of liked each other! And we've been friends for years ever since.”

Indianapolis who died in 2010, as a legislative guru. Cutter served as National Legislative Chair before becoming Department of Insurance Commissioner for Indiana. “As a member, as a friend, as someone in state leadership, dealing with all the bureaucracy, many times she would pick up the phone. She would call and say, ‘I just need to talk to somebody in the real world.’ And that said a lot to me,” Griffey says. “She impacted my life a lot.” Congresswoman Jackie Walorski. Before her death in 2022, Rep. Walorski (R-IN) taught Griffey to reach across the aisle. “We could sit and talk all about the benefits world. She could talk to people she firmly disagreed with, and she was very, very good at it. We don’t have that today. Jackie really helped to shape my career,” says Griffey. Jim Stenger and Mike Embry. “I learned a lot from the two presidents who preceded me who handled the previous five-year vision plan,” says Griffey. “I learned

26 bip magazine Fall 2024