When Rhonda Sciortino was just eight years old, the little shack where she lived with her grandparents nearly burned to the ground. They had no insurance, and for months the family was homeless. Rhonda vividly recalls wearing the same filthy sundress and flimsy dimestore flipflops to school day after day, long into winter.
Yet from the ashes of that fire rose an incredibly strong woman with a successful career in the insurance industry.
Rhonda had been a ward of the court from age six months until she emancipated at 16. Except for a brief time with a wonderful foster family, those 16 years were like living behind enemy lines in a combat zone.
One of the prerequisites to emancipation was that Rhonda have a job, so she went to work for the first person who would hire her. She was hired by an insurance agent, and there, she discovered her passion. To feel passionate about insurance may sound like a stretch, but that’s exactly what happened. When her employer explained the concept of insurance, Rhonda was flabbergasted. “You mean someone would have paid for our house to be rebuilt AND given us money for clothes and a place to sleep?”
From then on, Rhonda learned everything she could about insurance. She petitioned the Insurance Commissioner to allow her to sit for the insurance agent exam even though she wasn’t yet 18. Because she emancipated at age 16, an exception was granted, and Rhonda became California’s youngest licensed insurance agent at 17.
Rhonda compares her approach to selling insurance to that of an evangelical street preacher! She had personally experienced homelessness as a result of inadequate insurance, and she was passionate about protecting those who trusted her to help them.
In her early twenties, Rhonda began to combine her volunteerism and her vocation by helping to insure homes for abused children. At 27, committed to devoting her career to protecting child welfare organizations, Rhonda opened her first insurance brokerage. She has been involved in managing the risk of child welfare organizations ever since.