Has it really been a year since we last celebrated National Insurance Awareness Day? To properly celebrate the holiday, I have included a few words of appreciation about my favorite industry.

Thanks to risk transference provided by insurance, businesses can take risks. Retailers can open their stores each morning and drive away each evening and still sleep peacefully. Factory owners can turn on their machinery.

Thanks to risk transference provided by insurance, service businesses can offer advice and guidance. Online companies can collect shoppers’ personal information. New businesses can start, growing businesses can expand, research projects can launch, and new products can be developed.

Without insurance coverage, producers couldn’t get in a car to prospect for new clients or build relationships with current clients. Instead, they would sit around in the office talking. And you know how producers can talk!

Insurance provides a shelter in the storm so that entrepreneurs can open factories in distressed communities and thus improve the financial prospects of local residents. Local businesses will gain new customers, local property values will increase, additional tax dollars will flow into school budgets, and the overall standard of living will be improved.

Professional liability insurance frees a doctor to take the temperature, listen to the heartbeat and prescribe medicine for a sick child. A home health aide can provide comfort to an elderly patient. An assisted living facility can provide support to community members who once raised families, managed little league teams and helped neighbors but are no longer able to care for themselves.

Professional liability insurance frees a lawyer to advise a person who is in trouble or who wishes to purchase a home or start a business. A financial adviser can offer investment advice to a hardworking couple wishing to invest for their future. A counselor can provide support and guidance to a young person seeking to break the cycle of addiction. A medical research laboratory can work to prevent disease, cure illness and add to quality of life for millions.

Local communities can open pools and beaches for summer vacations thanks to insurance. Schools can sponsor athletic activities. Scout troops can take young people on walks through the woods.

Without insurance coverage, no bank could offer a line of credit or mortgage to an aspiring home or business owner. In its absence, not even a painting could be hung in the lobby of a new office building. No guard could be positioned at the front desk to process personal identification, no elevator could deliver passengers to higher floors, and no messenger could deliver a package. Of course, no cement would have been poured and no window would have been glazed.

Everything we touch, wear, travel in, sit on, drive on and eat is impacted by insurance at some point.

Although the business of insurance can at times appear to be rather commonplace, a closer look reveals it to be connecting tissue for almost every human activity. The good men and women who arrive at their desks at insurance carriers and agencies each morning make economic, charitable, leisure, cultural and just about every other human endeavor possible.

It is for these reasons and so many more that I will be celebrating National Insurance Awareness Day on June 28.