Liability Insurance
One of the best ways to protect you and your organization’s assets is to carry adequate liability insurance. A Commercial General Liability (CGL) insurance policy is your first line of defense against many common claims (such as bodily injury or property damage) that could occur in your garden or on other sites included in the policy. It enables your organization to continue operations while it faces real or fraudulent claims of certain types of negligence or wrongdoing.
Liability insurance is often required to access land — such as the vacant lots owned by the City of Pittsburgh — or to participate in certain programming — such as Grow Pittsburgh’s City Growers / Allegheny Grows garden programs.
Resources
With support from Grow Pittsburgh, IMA, Inc. has started group liability insurance policy for community gardeners. By pooling risk among several gardens, IMA is able to keep the costs extremely low for each individual garden to sign on. Presently, the group policy is only available for community food gardens participating in the City of Pittsburgh’s Adopt-A-Lot Program. To sign up, please contact: Ellen M Stroh, Vice President Commercial Lines Leader, 724-803-5861, Ellen.Stroh@imacorp.com.
Grow Pittsburgh is hoping to assist in starting another group policy for those gardening on non-city-owned land. If you are interested in this option, please contact Dora at dora@growpittsburgh.org.