Ageas Community Champions Qorus-NTT DATA Innovation in Insurance Awards 2026

Ageas Community Champions is a pioneering multi year program designed to strengthen the active citizenship literacy of insurance agents while increasing their participation in volunteering initiatives. It supports Ageas Foundation´s strategy of decentralizing volunteering initiatives across the country and reinforces Grupo Ageas Portugal´s proximity with the commercial network. It also has a major responsibility to help to respond to a societal challenge:  Portugal has one of the lowest levels of civic participation in Europe.   Insurance agents, rooted in their local communities, are uniquely positioned to respond to this.

The program was inspired by two main sources: informal examples of solidarity from agents who were already standing out as local community leaders, and our close partnership with Movimento Transformers, an NGO whose work in youth active citizenship helped us adapt a proven methodology to a new audience: insurance agents.  These early “champions” demonstrated the potential to scale this spirit across the entire network, reinforcing the belief that everyone can contribute and that anyone can become a “champion” when equipped with the right tools, structure and encouragement to act in their communities.

Therefore, the program is organized in three phases.

• In 2024, the Knowledge phase introduced the concepts of active citizenship and the role of agents as community actors, supported by a workshop and the launch of a web portal with inspirational videos from outstanding agents in solidarity and a mapping of volunteering opportunities. Together, these efforts generated 51 actions and 839 participations from agents, clients and other community members.

• In 2025, the Capacity Building and Action phase focused on developing agents’ skills through hackathons, peer learning, and collaboration with local organizations to assess community needs to design proposals for the participatory budgeting process, which mobilized more than 20 000 votes across 25 projects. No other insurer in Portugal directly mobilizes agents as community leaders or applies a democratic, community‑driven voting model to decentralize social impact.  Throughout the year, agents continued to engage in additional volunteering activities, further increasing their involvement to 1055 participations.

• The ongoing 2026 Implementation phase focuses, in addition to promoting agents’ engagement in volunteering and solidarity actions, on delivering the ten winning proposals across the country, a €30,000 investment that transforms ideas into concrete, community‑led initiatives.