The Million Dollar Matchmaker
How Eli Lilly and Company rose to the challenge and led the way to support the community during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to Exceptional Executive of the Year: Tiffany Benjamin
As the Senior Director of Social Impact at Eli Lilly and Company, Tiffany Benjamin’s life, career and passion is to understand the needs of our community and to lead her company in meeting those needs through extraordinary volunteerism and philanthropy. Central Indiana can easily credit Lilly, its employees, and its retirees with being foundational to the region’s success for more than a century.
COVID-19 changed everything, though. And yet, like so many times in our history, Lilly was first to respond.
As the virus reached the Hoosier border, Tiffany acted swiftly to approve a half million-dollar grant from the Lilly Foundation to support the COVID-19 Central Indiana Community Economic Relief Fund (C-CERF) – the first major economic relief fund in the U.S. To encourage other lead gifts, Tiffany promoted a generous Lilly two-to-one match to C-CERF from employees and retirees, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in incremental donations. In addition, Tiffany voluntarily served alongside the other C-CERF founding funders to analyze the needs in the community in real time and approve significant relief grants to more than 200 direct service organizations.
But even before COVID-19 hit our community, Tiffany was the impetus for a new corporate match strategy that would strengthen United Way’s impact for years to come. Working with Lilly’s Board of Directors, a one-to-one corporate match was implemented for new company partners and donors to UWCI. This monumental approach to fundraising during a critical time in the community resulted in almost $2 million in gifts from new company partners to help Central Indiana recover and rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Simply put, Tiffany is the ultimate matchmaker – matching Lilly grants, matchmaking in the corporate community, and matching the needs in our community with her company’s significant support.
“Tiffany is a force for good,” said the awards committee after reviewing Tiffany’s nomination for Exceptional Executive. “She is never out of good ideas. She never tires of helping people. She never stops caring about the role the Lilly plays in our community. She never quits as a social impact leader. Much of our community’s recovery should be credited to Tiffany Benjamin’s exceptional leadership at Eli Lilly.”
Congratulations to Tiffany Benjamin on being named United Way’s Exceptional Executive for 2020-2021.