This feature is part of our Relief Champion Spotlight series, celebrating 25 Years of Relief in 2026. Each installment highlights the client leaders and programs that have made employee financial relief a cornerstone of their workforce culture. Susan Towler, Executive Director of CSR and the Florida Blue Foundation, and Michelle Hamilton, Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Florida Blue Foundation, sat down to talk about what it took to build the program, what they've learned from some of its hardest moments and what they wish every employer in America already understood.
There is an inherent standard for those in healthcare. They are, by profession and by mission, in the business of taking care of other people. But what happens when life blindsides the healthcare worker: when the hurricane hits, the illness drags on, the bills pile up faster than the paychecks and the caregiver is the one who needs care?
GuideWell, a not-for-profit health services company and parent to a portfolio of organizations, including Florida Blue – the largest health insurer in the state, has spent nearly a decade answering that question with its Lift by GuideWell employee financial relief program. Built in partnership with E4E Relief and funded by a combination of corporate investment and voluntary employee contributions, Lift exists for a simple reason: the people most committed to helping communities achieve better health deserve to have someone watching out for them, too.
Something Was Missing
Before Lift existed, GuideWell leaders had already prioritized their employees’ well-being with initiatives including flexible spending accounts, dependent care and a robust employee assistance program. By most measures, company leaders were taking good care of their people. But there was a gap, and it took someone who had seen it filled elsewhere to point it out.
"A leader came to our organization who had a program at his other company and suggested it," said Executive Director of CSR, Susan Towler. "We looked into it and realized there was a need for employees facing unexpected crises that happen to all of us."
To confirm that instinct, the team went directly to the people who knew: HR, employee relations managers and the leaders of larger service teams with diverse employee populations. The picture they got back was granular and human: coworkers pooling their paid time off for a colleague whose husband was gravely ill; employees quietly cycling through the EAP for types of problems that conversations alone couldn't solve; situations where the formal safety net had holes, and people were falling through.
"Our GuideWell associates come to us because of our not-for-profit mission to help people and communities achieve better health," Towler says. "They're already caring when they walk in the door. So, it's only natural that we care for each other, too."
Once the need was established, the question became how to meet it and whether to build the infrastructure internally or find a trusted partner. GuideWell chose the latter, and after surveying the landscape, the answer was clear. "E4E Relief is by far the gold standard in this work and came highly recommended," Towler says. "We were really pleased to create that partnership almost 10 years ago."
Trial by Hurricane
No amount of preparation fully readies a program for its first real test. Lift by GuideWell's came fast.
In the late summer of 2017, a catastrophic storm, Hurricane Irma, tore through the Caribbean before grinding up the full length of the Florida peninsula. They both struck in rapid succession. GuideWell's workforce, concentrated heavily in Florida at the time, was directly in the path of both hurricanes.
"We had just launched Lift by GuideWell and were learning what kinds of issues employees needed help with," Towler remembers. "And then we quickly realized that most of our employees live in Florida, and Florida has hurricanes."
What followed was a crash course in large-scale disaster response. The team learned that hurricanes don't observe income brackets or property values; they flatten everything in their path regardless of who owns it. So Lift's response was to ensure any employee at any level could apply for financial relief, because hardship after a natural disaster does not discriminate, either.
The employee response was remarkable. Donations nearly doubled as coworkers who watched the storms unfold on television and in their colleagues' lives opened their hearts to the cause. The act of giving — and of knowing their charitable contributions would reach someone in their own office, building and community — created something beyond an employee financial relief program. It created solidarity. "Our employees were so generous," Towler said.
The GuideWell team’s instinct to monitor the horizon and get ahead of need rather than solely react to it has stayed with the program. When devastating floods struck Texas last year, the team reached out directly to leadership at WebTPA, GuideWell's Dallas-based portfolio company, before a single claim had come in. "When you're in a crisis, you're focused on the crisis. So, our team monitors what's happening and gets more proactive."
More Than a Rainy-Day Program
If hurricanes are the dramatic headline, they are far from the whole story. The everyday reality of Lift by GuideWell is quieter, more intimate and in many ways more consequential: an employee managing a prolonged illness, a family navigating sudden financial freefall, a person simply trying to keep the lights on while absorbing a blow that no one saw coming.
Senior Director of Corporate Social Responsibility, Michelle Hamilton, who oversees the program's day-to-day operations and GuideWell's broader corporate social responsibility work, credits the program's staying power to a strong ongoing partnership with E4E Relief. "When there's something new that we might want to consider for our program, our Relationship Manager at E4E Relief is always happy to share that with us and have discussions about why it might work," Hamilton says. "Having that strong partnership is really important."
Equally important is making sure employees know the program exists before they need it. GuideWell's communications team has become an essential internal partner, weaving mentions of Lift into the rhythm of the company calendar, from the annual employee giving campaign each spring to timely reminders whenever a regional disaster makes the news. Stories from employees who have received grants anchor the campaigns, lending them a weight that no amount of corporate copy can replicate.
"Our employees are just so giving," Hamilton says. "I think they're happy to share how beneficial receiving a financial relief grant was to them."
Those stories reflect something deeper than a healthy communications strategy. They reflect a culture in which vulnerability is not a liability. Where people feel safe enough to say: I needed help, I got it and I want you to know that it's there for you, too.
The Architecture of a Program That Works
For employers who are curious about launching something similar, both Towler and Hamilton have clear-eyed advice rooted in nearly a decade of real-world experience.
Start small. "We grappled with that a lot in the beginning; figuring out what issues and reasons would trigger support. You can always expand, but it's really hard when you offer something and then have to take it away."
Embrace the employee-contribution model. The Lift peer-to-peer dimension is not incidental to its success; it is central to it. Colleagues giving to colleagues creates a sense of shared investment that a purely corporate-funded program cannot replicate. It also builds awareness: when people are asked to give, they learn that the program exists.
Use a third-party administrator. "We could have run this program ourselves," Towler said, "but I value the firewall and third-party validation that E4E Relief offers. Imagine if it were our own employee team making decisions about our employees getting help; that could be seen as favoritism." The objectivity that comes with independent administration is not just a legal and compliance safeguard. It protects the program's integrity in the eyes of the employees it serves. And it allows our team to focus on empathy and connectedness during crisis rather than processing grant applications. Lift by GuideWell is not a one-department operation. Communications, HR, finance, legal and IT all have roles to play. That breadth of internal partnership is, in Towler's view, what makes it work. "It really is a cross-functional endeavor," she says.
What "Well-Being" Actually Means
Ask Hamilton for her definition of employee well-being and she doesn't reach for an HR policy manual. She thinks about what it means for a person to show up fully; not just at work but in their life.
"We prioritize making sure that they're in a good place when they're showing up for work, but also that their home life is in a good place," she says. "They can show up and be their best selves in both places. Having the culture of knowing that's a priority for the company — that is employee well-being."
Towler adds another dimension: the evidence, well documented in research, that giving back is good for the giver. GuideWell's volunteer program, GuideWell Gives, offers employees volunteer opportunities and allows them to track their volunteer hours in a database so they can see the magnitude of their shared impact. The time, talent and treasure framework is not a slogan. It is a coherent theory of how generosity sustains the people who practice it.
"There's a lot of research about the good feeling you get when you give back," Towler says.
The understanding that caring for others and caring for yourself are not competing imperatives, but complementary ones is, in the end, what Lift by GuideWell is about. It is a program built by people who believe their employees deserve to thrive. And after nearly 10 years, mulitple catastrophic hurricane seasons and countless, private moments of crisis and relief, the evidence suggests they were right to build it.
For the thousands of employees who have applied, donated and passed the word along to a colleague who needed it: Lift is working. And for the employers who haven't yet built something like it, GuideWell's message is simple. Your people are already showing up for your customers every day. It's time to show up for them.
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