Chris Reed – Nonprofits Insurance Alliance

When Chris Reed was two years old, his mother drove a car into a wall at 70 miles per hour. He was in the back seat. His mother and brother survived, but the crash reshaped everything: Their bodies, their futures, and the quiet resolve forming inside a child too young to understand what had just happened to his family.

Chris Reed | Nonprofits Insurance Alliance | General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer

Decades later, Reed sits in his office at Nonprofits Insurance Alliance, the Santa Cruz, California-based insurance organization he has called home since 2019, and he does not shy away from that story. He tells it the way people tell stories that have long since moved from wound to foundation.

“The accident with my mom, brother, and me changed everything,” he says. “The first part of my life was serving and helping them. Then, since about 2013, I started doing more public service.”

That trajectory, from a childhood marked by loss and obligation to a career defined by those same instincts at a greater scale, is the thread that runs through everything Reed has done.

Today, as general counsel for one of the country’s most distinctive nonprofit insurance organizations, he has found the rare setting where he can use an extraordinary set of skills.

A path built through detours

The journey that led Reed to law school was far from typical.

“I certainly didn’t go through the front door,” he says of his legal career.

Before law, Reed earned a degree in electrical engineering from San José State University and worked for two decades as an engineer, eventually spending eight years at Nokia as a senior engineering manager before noticing something that unsettled him: The tech industry’s quiet habit of aging out the people who built it.

After earning his J.D. from Monterey College of Law (while working full time at Nokia), Reed landed an unusual first assignment for a new attorney, working on Senator Carl Levin’s staff in Washington as an investigator for a Senate subcommittee.

There, his main project was the investigation into Renaissance Technologies Hedge Fund Basket Options, a complex financial tax avoidance case, the findings of which eventually reached the IRS and the Department of Justice, resulting in $7 billion payments to the IRS. Reed led a team of three L’s from some of the country’s most prestigious law schools. Reed was writing custom code to help them process documents at a scale that would have been impossible otherwise.

His engineering background kept opening doors that pure legal training could not. When a tech company came to Capitol Hill to present its machine learning capabilities to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office, her chief of staff remembered an attorney across the hall who understood computers. Reed went to the meeting. He helped deploy the technology in the investigation. The experience confirmed what he had long suspected: The intersection of law and engineering was a defining strength.

After Washington, Reed held roles at the Electric Power Research Institute, the University of California system as an IP officer, and a machine learning company that, as he puts it, “failed because the world simply was not ready for it in 2014.” Each stop added something. None of them felt random in retrospect.

Serving the hardest risks

Nonprofits Insurance Alliance was founded in 1989 by Pamela Davis, who built the organization from the ground up into something that covers tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations across the country. Its mission is to provide stable, fairly priced insurance products to nonprofit organizations that commercial insurers either avoid entirely or charge more than nonprofits can afford.

Nonprofits Insurance Alliance operates as a 501(c)(3) itself, with its members comprising the majority of its board, a structure Reed describes as genuinely unique in the insurance landscape.

Reed’s voice shifts when he talks about the work. There is something close to reverence in it.

“This is a hard job to stay in,” he says, “but it would be very difficult to leave.”

As general counsel, Reed oversees a team of seven, including three attorneys and four compliance professionals. He describes his primary function as the legal and risk steward of the resources that serve people in need. That means governance documents, policy forms, bylaws, banking relationships, and anything else that touches the legal architecture of a functioning insurance company.

He is also the only electrical engineer in the building, with articles published in IEEE journals and multiple issued patents, a background that has occasionally proven useful, particularly when the organization encounters issues with its battery storage system.

But the work that clearly moves him most is the legislation.

Where law meets mission

Reed and Nonprofits Insurance Alliance have spent years working with state legislatures to craft liability frameworks that protect both the vulnerable people nonprofits serve and the organizations that serve them.

He testified before the Pennsylvania state assembly on a bill that was ultimately signed into law by a unanimous bipartisan vote. Related legislation has been passed in New York. A bill was recently passed in Texas, modeled on Nonprofits Insurance Alliance’s draft legislation in California. Hawaii is now using that same framework as a template.

The policy challenge he describes is genuinely difficult, and crafting effective solutions in the various states becomes very complex: If a nonprofit volunteer makes a mistake and someone is injured, there must be fair recourse. But if the organization’s liability exposure persists — despite compliance with state standards and operating in good faith — and destroys it, the most vulnerable people lose the services they depend on. No simple solution can address all states.

“Fundamentalism of any kind is intellectual laziness,” Reed says. “Complex problems generally require intellectual rigor to produce complex solutions.”

At the federal level, Reed has made roughly 15 trips to Washington, D.C. over the past six years to advance the Nonprofit Property Protection Act, a bill most recently championed by Senator Sherrod Brown that, if passed, would eliminate restrictive regulations on nonprofits and faith-based organizations. He has met with members of both parties. While the reception is warm, progress has not yet matched it.

None of that discourages him in any visible way. If anything, it seems to confirm why the work matters.

Building something that lasts

Reed describes Nonprofits Insurance Alliance’s founder, Pamela Davis, with deep admiration and respect for her vision and moral compass.

“She has created this whole thing,” he says. “She has built something that would be worth billions if it were a private company, but she chose to make it a nonprofit.”

He is also deliberate about the culture he is building around him. He mentors students at San Jose State University School of Engineering, Monterey College of Law and in startups. He practices traditional Chinese martial arts, studies languages, and takes college courses, all with a commitment to constant renewal. He thinks about the people on his team and what it means for them to understand the stakes of their work.

“I like the idea that people on my team take pride in the impact they have on communities and the people they serve,” he says.

For Reed, who once sat in a wrecked car as a toddler while his family’s life shifted permanently around him, the concept of impact has never been abstract. It is what got him through the difficult years and motivates him to work long hours.

Nonprofits are under pressure, he says. The organizations that serve the most vulnerable people in the country need advocates who understand both the law and the stakes. Reed is grateful to be able to serve at a time when it is most needed.