Community Impact Teams

For most of its history, United Way worked to improve lives by mobilizing the financial resources of businesses, individuals, and foundations in support of direct service programs - the foundation of our work, now and into the future. However, despite the money raised and services provided, many problems in our community continued and some even grew worse.

While our community had, for example, provided high quality child care that improved thousands of children's lives, we didn't know what percentage of our children were ready to succeed in kindergarten and beyond. While we provided programs to help youth build character and skills, a large percentage of them were not graduating from High School. While many adults received job training, too many did not attain and retain jobs.

To address these larger, systemic issues, United Way saw a need to deal with the conditions that created them in the first place. Doing so called for a change in how United Way does its work; a change that requires focusing collective action on establishing goals, identifying strategies and measurements and mobilizing the resources - people and financial - to find and deliver solutions to the problems keeping our community from being stronger.

While impact at the program level, or direct service, is essential to community-level change, we must also be looking at systemic change. Systemic change moves beyond the individual and works to influence systems - systems can be on many different levels. There is a human service delivery system, a school system, a system of care for the elderly. Changing community attitudes and building community is also working with systems.

One example of systemic change that could move the needle on having our children achieve academic success is the use of standardized assessments at kindergarten entry. This strategy lets teachers plan individualized interventions, ensuring children's healthy development and their positive progress through school, so they will graduate and become successful and financially stable adults.

Evolving over the past decade but taking a dramatic leap forward with the adoption of the Agenda for Community Impact in June 2010, United Way implemented a new model focused on mobilizing diverse resources and partnerships that go beyond the dollars pledged through the annual campaign. Our partners include nonprofit human service agencies, schools, government policy-makers and bodies, businesses, voluntary associations, the faith community and others working together to change the conditions that improve the lives not just of program clients, but of community populations. This is what we call community impact.

In November 2010, the Community Impact Teams worked to identify the outcomes that are most relevant at this time, for our community, to make a platform for everlasting change in our community. Below, you will find the outcomes for each focus area.

The Community Impact Teams are working to:

Identify for the United Way Board of Directors, the education, income, and health needs in our United Way service area.
Review the service of local and regional partners in meeting community needs.
Review and evaluate requests for financial resources.
Monitor service delivery to assure adherence to accepted purposes.

In the spring of 2011, Community Impact Teams reviewed all Applications for Funding. Education, Income, and Health all met individually to discuss the applications.

We have worked very hard to reach, what we feel, the outcomes needed to make lasting change in our regional community. Click below to view the results of our work.

Education

Income

Health