Safeco: Corporate giving will continue

The white shirts are long gone, and so too are the chimes that signaled synchronized coffee breaks at Safeco's old University District headquarters.

While Safeco's business culture has changed over the past decade or so, the company has maintained its culture of giving, funneling millions of dollars to local arts groups and nonprofit organizations since its founding here 85 years ago.

Despite Wednesday's news that the larger, Boston-based Liberty Mutual Group plans to purchase the Seattle insurance provider, Safeco officials say they have no intentions of scaling back their philanthropic activities.

When it comes to corporate giving, "it is business as usual," said Safeco spokesman Paul Hollie.

Before the first pitch is thrown at Saturday's Mariners game, the company will announce $1.1 million in grants to five local nonprofits, Hollie said.

Including those five grants, the company plans to give away $8.95 million this year, up from $7.86 million in 2007. Last year's donations included $500,000 to both the Northwest African American Museum and the Wing Luke Asian Museum.

Liberty Mutual has a reputation for maintaining the local and regional brands it acquires — so if anything, Hollie said, the merger could give Safeco "more traction" to give back to the Seattle community and others across the Northwest.

At one time, all Safeco employees were required to wear white, button-down shirts, a policy that ended in 1996. Employees also took coffee breaks at the same time, with chimes announcing the floor-by-floor breaks.

"People talk about it with an air of fondness," Hollie said of that time in the company's history.

Employees are also proud of the company's legacy of volunteerism and philanthropy, he said. In 2006, the company created The Safeco Insurance Foundation, which now has an endowment worth more than $90 million, Hollie said.

When Boeing announced in 2001 that it was moving its corporate headquarters to Chicago, "all of us shook in our boots," worried that local arts had lost a major funder, said Jim Tune, president of ArtsFund. That apprehension proved to be baseless, and Tune predicts not much will change with the Safeco sale.

Though not as big as Boeing or Microsoft, Safeco has always been "a huge deal for the local arts community," Tune said.

Since the organization's inception in 1969, Safeco has donated more than $3 million to the fund, which gives money to help with operating expenses for more than 70 arts groups in King and Pierce counties.

The African American Partnership for Prosperity, a three-year-old nonprofit that seeks to level the playing field for minority business owners, received its first $10,000 grant from Safeco in October, said co-founder Andrew Harris.

"They were very enthusiastic givers, and we're very lucky," Harris said. "That money will go a long way."

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com