Community Impact
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 all of the
services provided, many problems in our community continued and some even grew
worse.
While our community had, for example, providing 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. 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, systematic 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 even
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 the human service
delivery system, a school system, a system of care for the elderly. Changing
community attitudes and building community will 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 that they will graduate and become
successful and financially stable adults.
United Way's new model will focus on mobilizing diverse
resources and partnerships that go beyond the dollars pledged through the
annual campaign. Our partners may 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 to improve the lives not just of program clients, but of community
populations. This is what we call Community Impact.
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