The vehicle owner’s personal auto policy
Generally responds first, subject to its own terms and whether the use was permitted. This is the policy doing most of the work, and the organization does not control it.
Moon Insurance Managers, Inc. · TDI license #5595
Nonprofit Insurance in Houston, TX
“Nonprofit” describes how an organization is constituted. It does not describe a policy, and it does not predict a single exposure. A neighborhood association, a food pantry, a youth program, a church, a trade group, an animal rescue, an arts organization, a school, a foundation and a clinic do not create the same duties or the same claims.
So this page builds the map first — what the organization does, who does it, and who could be affected — and only then asks which policy is designed to address each part. The Texas volunteer-law section is at the end for a reason: it is the part most often quoted and least often read.
Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 84 Charitable Immunity Act
Caps, and the condition on them
- Bodily injury, per person
- $500,000
- Per occurrence
- $1 million
- Property damage
- $100,000 per occurrence
- Available only if
- You insure at those amounts
- § 84.004 volunteers
- Separate, not insurance-conditioned
Agent of record
- 41years in Houston
- 20+markets compared
- Same dayDPS filing
- #5595TDI license
If something has already happened
A board dispute, an employment allegation, an abuse report, a vehicle accident, a suspected theft or a privacy incident goes to the current carrier under its own notice terms, to counsel, and to whichever reporting authorities the situation requires — and an abuse allegation has mandatory-reporting duties that come before anything on this page. Then call us on (281) 484-8320. Do not put any of those facts into a form on a website.
Start here
Ten questions that follow the mission
- Premises, and interaction with the public.
- Professional, educational, care or social services delivered to people.
- Decisions made by the board and the officers.
- Employees, applicants, volunteers and third parties.
- Abuse prevention, and how an allegation would be handled.
- Money, property, and the ways funds can be induced to leave.
- Donor, member, client and employee information.
- Benefit plans, if the organization sponsors any.
- Vehicles: owned, rented and volunteer-driven.
- Fundraisers, admission, auctions, food and alcohol.
A board that can answer those ten can be told which coverages are relevant and which are noise. Working the other way round — starting from a list of products — is how organizations end up carrying something they do not need beside a gap nobody priced.
The base policy
Where general liability stops
General liability insurance is generally designed for covered bodily-injury and property-damage allegations arising from premises, operations and — in the right form — products or events. It is the base, and it is not a universal answer. It is typically not the policy for:
- A board or governance decision.
- Discrimination, harassment, retaliation or wrongful termination.
- An alleged failure in a professional or social service.
- Theft by an employee or a volunteer.
- Funds induced out of the organization by a fraudulent instruction.
- Abuse or molestation.
- A privacy or data-security event.
- Damage to the organization’s own property.
- A vehicle accident.
Some of those are excluded outright, some need an endorsement, and some belong to an entirely different policy. The sections below take them in turn.
What you do for people
Services carry their own exposure
An organization that provides counseling, case management, education, mentoring, health-related services, direct care, referrals, training or placement can face an allegation that the service — or a failure to perform it — caused harm. That is not a premises claim, and the base policy is not built for it.
Professional liability insurance, or a mission-specific social-service form, is where that question lives. What to read for: how covered services are defined; whether employees, volunteers, contractors, students and interns are insured; how bodily-injury exclusions or carve-backs are handled; licensing and credential requirements; the claims-made trigger and the retroactive date; the duty to report claims and potential claims; defense costs and consent; where abuse, privacy and medical-professional boundaries fall; and contractual liability.
One event can implicate both the base policy and the professional form. Neither should be assumed to fill the other’s exclusions.
Two different claimants
The board, and the people you employ
These are separate policy questions that arrive in the same conversation, and they are frequently sold in one package — which is not the same as being one coverage.
Decisions made at the top
Directors and officers liability insurance is designed to respond to covered wrongful-act claims against insured individuals and, where the form includes it, the entity itself. The review identifies which roles are insured — organization, subsidiary, director, officer, trustee, committee member, volunteer, adviser — then the entity coverage and the insured-versus-insured wording, the defense, retention and allocation arrangements and whether defense erodes the limit, prior and known circumstances, the claims-made and reporting terms, how financial-distress, creditor, grant, donor, membership and regulatory allegations are treated, and the benefit-plan, employment, professional, privacy and bodily-injury exclusions.
Claims from employees, applicants and volunteers
Employment practices liability insurance is designed for covered allegations such as discrimination, harassment, retaliation or wrongful termination, and it may sit inside a nonprofit management package or be written on its own.
Two questions matter more than the limit. Who is insured — volunteers, applicants, independent contractors and third parties are treated differently by different forms. And which claims are inside it: wage-and-hour, overtime, classification, benefits and labor-relations allegations are commonly excluded or limited, sometimes to defense costs only. Retroactive dates, notice, defense and consent all still apply.
The hardest subject
Abuse allegations need prevention and wording
An organization serving children, older adults, people with disabilities, patients, students or other people at risk should treat this as two subjects, in this order. Prevention: screening, supervision, training, incident response, mandatory reporting and survivor-centered practice. Insurance never replaces any of that, and no policy makes a program safe.
Then the wording, because general liability and professional forms may exclude abuse or molestation, sublimit it, or address it by specific endorsement, and a separate form may be needed. Compare:
- how the alleged perpetrator, the victim and the insureds are each defined;
- whether employee, volunteer, contractor, participant-on-participant and client-on-client acts are covered;
- whether negligent hiring, supervision, retention and reporting are inside or outside;
- whether the trigger is occurrence or claims-made;
- the retroactive date, and how prior knowledge is handled;
- defense, and how the aggregate works;
- whether the organization and an accused person are covered differently; and
- whether crisis-response or counseling expense is offered at all.
Money
Name the ways funds can leave
Commercial crime coverage can address direct loss from specified perils — theft by an employee, forgery or alteration, computer fraud, funds-transfer fraud, loss of money and securities, theft on or away from the premises. The perils are the coverage, and the definitions decide the claim.
Two definitions catch nonprofits specifically. A volunteer may not meet the form’s definition of “employee”, which matters in an organization where volunteers count the collection or hold a card. And a loss induced by a fraudulent email, text or voice call may be treated as social engineering rather than computer or funds-transfer fraud — frequently a separate grant, with a lower limit and a verification condition.
Map it before shopping it:
- who can initiate, approve and release funds;
- what dual-control and call-back procedures exist;
- which volunteers, bookkeepers, board members or outsourced accountants touch money;
- online banking and donation platforms;
- cash at events;
- investment or endowment custody; and
- grant and restricted-fund controls.
And resist the two easy stories: not every missing dollar is employee dishonesty, and not every crime form includes the fraudulent-instruction loss that is now the common one.
Records
Donor and client information needs a response path
Donation systems, mailing lists, employee records, benefit information, client files, payment cards and cloud vendors together create privacy, security, funds-transfer and interruption exposure — usually held by an organization with no dedicated technical staff, which is the part that makes the response plan matter more than the limit.
Cyber liability insurance can be reviewed for covered incident response, notification, privacy claims, network interruption, cybercrime and vendor dependency. Each insuring agreement has its own trigger and exclusions, and the policy does not make an organization compliant with anything.
If something may be happening now, preserve the evidence and use the current insurer’s own response resources and counsel. Incident details do not belong in a quote form.
If you sponsor a plan
A bond and a liability policy are not substitutes
Where the organization sponsors an ERISA plan, two different instruments are in play and the Department of Labor is explicit that they serve different purposes. The required ERISA fidelity bond protects the plan against fraud or dishonesty by the people who handle plan funds. Fiduciary liability insurance may address covered allegations that a fiduciary breached duties in administering the plan.
Neither is the same as governance coverage, crime coverage or employee-benefits liability, and holding one does not satisfy the other.
Wheels
A volunteer driving needs three answers
This is the exposure boards are most often given a single answer about, and it has three parts that do not overlap:
The organization’s non-owned auto liability
May protect the nonprofit when the nonprofit is sued, often excess of the owner’s insurance. It is protection for the entity.
What is left uncovered
Non-owned liability generally does not repair the volunteer’s vehicle and does not automatically make the driver an insured. A volunteer who learns this after a crash usually learns it from their own carrier.
Confirm whether volunteers are insureds under the actual form, and whether the mission involves carrying passengers, minors, clients, deliveries or regular routes — all of which change the conversation. Owned and rented vehicles are a separate review on commercial auto insurance. Volunteer accident coverage can also be considered for injuries to volunteers themselves; it is not a substitute for auto liability or for coverage of occupational injury.
Texas law
Chapter 84 is a qualification test
The Texas Charitable Immunity and Liability Act is the most quoted and least read statute in this subject. It is not a status that nonprofits have; it is a set of conditions that may or may not be met, and every condition is doing work:
- The organization has to meet Chapter 84’s definition of a charitable organization — which turns on specified entities, purposes, and operating, tax, support and governance conditions.
- The person has to meet its definition of a volunteer: serving for or on behalf of a qualifying organization without compensation beyond expense reimbursement. That can include a qualifying director, officer or trustee as well as a direct-service volunteer.
- The act or omission has to fall within the course and scope of the volunteer’s duties.
- The protection is personal to the volunteer — § 84.004(e) says it does not apply to the organization’s own liability for a volunteer’s acts or omissions.
- Motor-driven equipment has its own rule, tied to required and existing applicable insurance.
- Intentional, wilfully negligent, consciously indifferent and reckless conduct falls outside the Act.
- Duties and liabilities a director or officer owes to the organization itself, or to its members, are untouched by it.
Separately — and this is the part most often merged into the above — §§ 84.005 and 84.006 limit certain employee and nonhospital charitable organization liability to $500,000 per person and $1 million per occurrence for bodily injury or death, plus $100,000 per occurrence for property damage. Section 84.007(g) makes those limits unavailable unless the organization carries liability coverage applying to the organization, its employees and its volunteers at least at the statutory amounts, or an allowed combined-limit arrangement.
Read that boundary carefully: the insurance condition attaches to the §§ 84.005–.006 limits. It does not make insurance a condition of the separate volunteer protection in § 84.004. Health-care, governmental, child-welfare and other categories can carry further exclusions and rules, and whether the Act applies to a particular organization is a question for counsel rather than for an agent.
Source: Tex. Civil Practice & Remedies Code ch. 84. Verified .
Federal law
The volunteer statute is conditional too
The federal Volunteer Protection Act may limit tort liability for a qualifying volunteer who was acting within the scope of their responsibilities, held whatever authorization or licensing the activity required, and did not engage in the misconduct the statute specifies. It excludes certain vehicle-related harm and other conduct.
The sentence that matters to a board: the statute expressly says it does not affect the organization’s own liability. Neither Texas nor federal volunteer law removes the need to analyze governance, general liability, professional, auto, abuse, privacy, employment or crime exposure — they protect individuals, on conditions, and that is all.
Source: 42 U.S.C. § 14503. Verified .
The gala
A fundraiser is four questions at once
A one-off event — gala, auction, festival, race, food sale — adds:
- Rented premises, and liability for the event itself.
- Vendors, and the insured-status requirements between them.
- Cash, tickets, donations and auction property.
- Participant or athletic exposure, where the event involves either.
- Cancellation expense.
- Alcohol authority, and who is legally selling.
The venue clause, the certificate and the additional-insured endorsement are worked through on special event insurance, which is also where the event date and activity questions live.
On alcohol, the question is not the bar format. Ask whether it is truly free, included with admission, sold, donated, tipped or auctioned — because TABC treats a drink as sold when it is available only to paying guests or bundled with admission, and “free” drinks at a ticketed charity ball is the example TABC gives. Qualifying nonprofits have specific temporary-event and auction routes; eligibility is not universal, and it is worth confirming before the invitations go out.
Source: TABC — license and permit FAQs. Verified .
The rest of the map
Property, income and paid staff
The board map should also carry the building, tenant improvements, equipment, fine arts, donated property, outdoor property and property in transit; income, extra expense, dependent property and grant continuity after a covered property loss; and excess limits — but only after the underlying policies they would sit over are identified.
For paid staff, Texas does not require most private employers to carry coverage for occupational injury. That election is lawful, it comes with duties and a defined litigation exposure, and a grant or a contract can require the coverage regardless of what the statute permits. The material is on workers’ compensation insurance.
Source: TDI — employer coverage requirements. Verified .
No obligation
What makes the review quick
- Legal entity, tax classification, formation documents, mission and operating scope.
- Programs, services, who is served, any licenses held, and the locations.
- Board, committee, employee, contractor, intern and volunteer roles, with count bands.
- Screening, training, supervision and incident-response practices at a high level.
- How money is handled: banking, donations, approvals and dual control.
- What kinds of information the organization holds, and the key vendors.
- Any benefit plans.
- Owned, rented and volunteer-driven vehicle use.
- Property, events, fundraisers, admission, food, auctions and alcohol.
- Current policies with retroactive dates and endorsements, plus a high-level loss history.
- Grant, lease, lender, venue or partner insurance clauses.
Governing documents, policies, contracts, financial records, employee files, anything about a client or a donor, loss runs and allegation details travel through a secure route we will name on the call.
Monday to Thursday, 9:00 to 5:00; Friday, 9:00 to 4:00. The Houston office is at 360 FM 1959, Houston, TX 77034.
Questions boards ask
What insurance should a nonprofit review?
Work through the mission rather than a product list: premises, the services delivered to people, board decisions, employment, abuse prevention, theft and fraudulent payment instructions, data, benefit plans, vehicles, events, property, income after a covered loss, and injury to paid staff. Which of those matter depends on what the organization does — a food pantry, a youth program, a clinic and a trade association do not share an answer.
Can a director or board member be named personally?
Yes, and being named establishes neither liability nor coverage. Governance coverage is designed for covered wrongful-act claims against insured individuals and, where the form includes it, the entity — subject to claims-made and reporting terms, the defense and retention arrangements, the insured-versus-insured wording, prior and known circumstances, and its exclusions. Those terms are the coverage; the product name is not.
Does Texas charitable immunity protect every nonprofit?
No, and this is the misunderstanding worth correcting first. The organization and the person both have to meet Chapter 84’s definitions and conditions. Where they do, the Act can give a qualifying volunteer personal protection for acts within the course and scope of their duties — and § 84.004(e) expressly leaves the organization’s own liability for those acts in place. Certain serious conduct falls outside the Act entirely, and legal counsel decides whether it applies at all.
Does Chapter 84 volunteer protection require the nonprofit to buy insurance?
No. Section 84.007(g)’s insurance condition attaches to the separate employee and nonhospital-charitable-organization damage limits in §§ 84.005–.006. It is not a condition of the personal volunteer protection in § 84.004. Those two things are frequently combined, including by people who should know better.
Does employment coverage answer a wage-and-hour claim?
Often not for indemnity. Wage, overtime, classification and benefits allegations are commonly excluded or limited, and some forms respond with defense costs only under a sublimit. Read the exact form before assuming a pay-practices dispute is inside it.
Does non-owned auto coverage protect a volunteer’s car?
Generally no. It may protect the organization’s own liability when the organization is sued, often excess of the owner’s personal insurance — but it generally does not repair the car and does not automatically insure the driver. If the mission involves transporting clients, minors or regular routes, that is worth confirming in writing before the next trip rather than after one.
Does crime coverage include volunteer theft and phishing?
Not automatically, and the definitions are where it turns. A volunteer may not meet the form’s definition of "employee". A loss induced by a fraudulent email, text or phone call may be treated as social engineering rather than as computer fraud or funds-transfer fraud, and that grant is often separate, with a lower limit and a verification condition attached.
Is abuse or molestation covered by general liability?
Do not assume it is. General liability and professional forms may exclude it, sublimit it, or address it by specific endorsement, and a separate form may be needed. Insurance is also the second half of this subject rather than the first — screening, supervision, training, incident response, mandatory reporting and survivor-centered practice are not things a policy can replace.
Can we serve “free” drinks at a ticketed fundraiser without a TABC question?
No. TABC treats a drink as sold when it is available only to paying guests or bundled with admission — a ticketed charity ball with "free" drinks is the example TABC itself gives of a sale. Qualifying nonprofits do have specific temporary-event and auction routes, but not every organization is eligible, so confirm the authority before the invitations go out.