Central Pennsylvania Teamsters Health & Welfare Fund

Central Pennsylvania Teamsters Health & Welfare Fund

The Central Pennsylvania Teamsters Health & Welfare Fund was established in 1955 as a multiemployer plan serving Teamsters union members throughout the state. It operates alongside the Central Pennsylvania Teamsters Pension Fund — a defined-benefit and defined-contribution plan — sharing administration, trustees, and a single office in Wyomissing under the leadership of Administrator Joseph J. Samolewicz and Board Chairman William M. Shappell. The fund provides health benefits, disability coverage, and death benefits to active and retired participants. The portfolio blends direct holdings with external manager commitments across buyout, distressed debt, venture capital, mezzanine, natural resources, and secondaries strategies. On the real-asset side, confirmed positions include Intercontinental Real Estate Investment and the Core Property Fund, anchoring the fund’s commercial-property exposure within the United States. The plan allocates to early-stage venture — spanning seed, start-up, and late-stage — as well as fund-of-funds vehicles that provide diversified access to private markets without the staff overhead of a large internal investment team. With an estimated $2.2 billion in assets across both the health & welfare and pension pools, the combined entity runs a lean operation from a single Pennsylvania office. The funds are active in the Pennsylvania Conference of Teamsters, a state-level association of union locals and affiliated benefit plans that shapes labor-side investment priorities. The plan does not maintain a public-facing investment team page, and investment decisions appear to flow through the board of trustees and administrator rather than a separate internal CIO structure. The fund’s structural differentiator lies in its fully interwoven health-and-pension architecture: the health & welfare plan and the pension plan share governance, administration, and a single balance-sheet strategy, creating an unusually unified asset pool for a Taft-Hartley plan. This consolidation allows the combined fund to allocate to illiquid strategies at a scale that individual benefit silos could not support on their own.