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Best Collaboration Between a Business and a Nonprofit: Indiana Sports Corp. and OneAmerica Financial
To put on a spectacle the size and scope of the 2024 U.S. Olympic Team Swimming Trials, you need plenty of friends. The Indiana Sports Corp. has that in OneAmerica Financial, which delivered leadership, money, volunteers and more to help make the nine-day event a success.
From June 15-23, 2024, more than 285,000 people attended the trials, which served as the national championships in swimming for the United States and the qualifier for swimming at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Some 20,689 spectators attended opening night, a world record for attendance at a swim meet. Five days later, the evening session on June 19 broke that record with an attendance of 22,209.
“We have a tight relationship with Sports Corp.,” OneAmerica Chair, President and CEO Scott Davison said. “So working with them didn’t take any effort. We just got to work. We understood each other’s strengths and brought those strengths to the surface and to the table.”
“I think if you attended a meeting, you would not be able to draw a distinction between who worked for who,” added Karin Sarratt, OneAmerica Financial executive vice president. “There really was this embedded spirit of one team,
one group, working toward common outcomes.”
Davison and Sarratt served as co-chairs for the local organizing committee. Both have long-standing relationships with the Sports Corp. as board members and event organizers.
“We were looking for them to be passionate leaders of the event and staunch supporters to help execute the event,” Sports Corp. President Patrick Talty said. “We came to them and said, ‘Hey, what we really need is support around, how do we get this out into the community? How do we make sure that people are going to know that this event is happening and that they should come and be a part of it?’”
OneAmerica helped deliver $2 million in financial support, “a volunteer army” of about 700 to help cover some of the 6,000 volunteer shifts available, and the Learn to Swim legacy project that involved teaching 50,000 underserved people in central Indiana how to swim.
“The fact that people actually are going to have their lives saved from our legacy efforts, there’s something pretty special about that,” Sarratt said.
Davison said the event ended up a win-win-win: good for OneAmerica’s business, good for all the businesses that participated and good for the city, state and community at large. “That’s what made this uniquely special, because that’s something that’s our secret sauce here in Indianapolis.”
But as Talty noted, for OneAmerica, “It wasn’t just about getting their brand out and getting noticed. They cared about the outcome of the event and how it would affect the community, and that’s really what makes a difference about a great partner and why this collaboration was so unique and special.”•
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