THE POLISH NATIONAL ALLIANCE

More Detailed Version - Page 1

By Donald E. Pienkos

The Polish National Alliance of the United States of North America [PNA in Polish is Zwiazek Narodowy Polski w Stanach Zjednoczonych Polnocnej Ameryki, ZNP] is the largest fraternal insurance benefit association of the more than twenty such organizations created by Americans of Polish origins. It is also the largest of all fraternals formed on the basis of the national origins of their members. As of December 31, 1996, the PNA ranked eighth in total membership among 105 fraternal organizations in the United States with more than 230,000 life insurance policy holders. It also placed thirteenth in total assets, with more than $304 million, and eighteenth in the amount of insurance coverage it provided, with more than $721 million. While the PNA has members in every state, it is licensed to conduct business in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia. Since its founding in 1880, it is estimated that two million people have belonged to the Alliance

The PNA is a fraternal insurance benefit association. Though fraternals are quite diverse in their size, the memberships they serve, and their particular activities, all have a number of common characteristics, According to the National Fraternal Congress of America, a fraternal is:

any incorporated society, order or supreme lodge, without capital stock (whose activities are) conducted solely for the benefit of its members and their beneficiaries and not for profit (and which is) operated on a lodge system with a ritualistic form of work (and which has) a representative form of government, and which makes provision for the payment of benefits.

Membership in the Polish National Alliance is based on a person's purchase of life insurance. From 1995, Persons holding an annuity or individual retirement account with the PNA have also been counted as members. All members in good standing who have reached the age of sixteen have the right to participate in electing their leaders- All adult members are eligible to seek any elective office in the fraternal, from the lodge up to the national level.

The PNA is a not-for-profit association. The yields it earns from its investments (in U.S. government securities, corporate bonds and home mortgages to its policy holders) are used primarily for the benefit of its members. These come in two forms--as dividends paid to its insurance holders and as fraternal benefits. The latter include a variety of sports, youth, and cultural programs, and a college scholarship program. Twice each month, adult active members also receive, at no cost, the Alliance's fraternal publication, Zgoda [Harmony]. Funds are also dispensed to needy members and non-members, too. Just in recent years, the PNA provided aid to victims of the Florida hurricane (1992), the flooding of the Missouri River (1993), the Los Angeles earthquake (1994) and the Central American hurricanes (1998). The needy in Poland have received substantial PNA aid too over the decades. A very recent example came in 1997, when it shipped more than $4 million in supplies there in the aftermath of massive floods in the southern regions of the country,

ORIGINS and IDEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS: The Polish National Alliance was founded on February 15, 1880, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by a group of Polish emigres who were invited by Julius Andrzejkowicz (1821-1898), the proprietor of a chemical company to form a nationwide organization committed to an action program to support the independence of their partitioned Polish homeland and to give. humanitarian assistance to its people. Although these ideas were not particularly new, and several earlier efforts dating back to 1842 had been made to bring together politically minded Poles to work for these causes, the time was ripe for a Polish National Alliance, largely because of the rapid growth in the size of the Polish immigration in the United States. Indeed, in 1860, there were only 30,000 Poles in America; in 1880 the number had risen to an estimated 500,000. (By 1890 the figure would grow to 1,000,000 and in 1900 it would again double.) Also important to the later success of the PNA was another set of objectives its founders soon included into its program, one having to do with the betterment of the conditions of the immigrant population. Significantly, up to the time of its formation, no organization like the PNA existed (the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America fraternal, established in 1873, had a somewhat different mission)    

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