Improving Lives: One Person, One Community at a Time

My co-workers inspire me each and every day – not only for their commitment to our customers and clients, but for how they are driven to change lives for the better in our communities. Each year, we support some of them who have a truly extraordinary passion for helping others in meaningful ways. When I hear their stories of what they are doing, it always reminds me what makes Cigna so special: our people.

I’d like to tell you about one of our co-workers, Ashok Venkatachalam. He leads an engineering team in Cigna’s Technology organization, and does great work in delivering innovative products and services for our customers. He also participated in our Community Ambassador Fellowship Program – an experience that was life-changing both for him, and for 3,000 children and their families in India.

We started our Community Ambassador Fellowship program to support our co-workers in making an impact that goes far beyond the work we do each and every day. Every year, we provide up to 15 Cigna employees with up to three months’ paid leave and up to $20,000 for projects improving the health, well-being, and peace of mind of people in the communities where we live and work. In the four years since the program began, we’ve had 49 Fellows, and they’ve spent more than 22,000 hours doing good in the world – for moms in Rwanda helping their newborns stay healthy, families in Connecticut trying to put enough food on the table, recovering addicts in Ohio trying to stay clean, and so many others.

When Ashok traveled to India in early 2020 as a Community Ambassador Fellow, he was ready to take on a heartbreaking challenge: thousands of children in India who go blind every year because of a Vitamin A deficiency. These children are also at much higher risk of getting severely sick – and even dying – from common childhood infections. Ashok wanted to prevent these tragedies and spent six weeks distributing Vitamin A supplements in rural communities in partnership with SevaChild, a nonprofit organization that has been doing this work for the past decade.

It’s incredible to think about the number of lives Ashok and the other fellows have touched. We’re gratified that 3,000 kids and their family members in India can rest easier knowing that they now have protection from the terrible effects of an easily preventable condition. Everybody has personal reasons for stepping up like this, and Ashok says he was inspired to do this project by his own daughters and a desire to give back to the country he emigrated from more than 20 years ago. As a father, I’m deeply moved when I think about what his actions mean to the children and their parents. I imagine how these children will grow up and what they’ll accomplish – and how one day they will help others and their own communities flourish.

We recently announced our 2022 Fellows. You can read about them and their inspiring projects here. They’ll be helping others in locations from rural Michigan to Brisbane Australia. We’re proud of them and of this remarkable program, which speaks so strongly to the values that we hold dear at Cigna. As our Fellows do incredible acts of service, they reflect a broader truth about our 70,000 colleagues around the world: they care, and are committed to helping others, whether across the world or in their own backyards – one person, one neighborhood, one community at a time.