Tri-County United Way

Brief Summary of our move to the Community Impact Model:

We are moving to engage in comprehensive, open communications with the entire Tri-County community.   We will strive to understand and prioritize human services needs, but to also understand the root causes of the challenges in our communities that lead to the needs for human services.  We intend to champion and lead efforts that address these needs and their root causes through mobilization of resources (volunteers, dollars, etc) and partnerships with other aligned community organizations to drive true lasting change and improvements to the quality of life in our region.  Our future operating model will go beyond our current operating modes of just collecting and dispersing monies to deserving human services agencies.  An example of how this works is our taking the lead on efforts to mitigate urgent, crisis-like, area problems such as the Food & Energy Crisis and partner efforts to distribute smoke detectors to senior citizens.  

Many successful United Ways throughout the USA have converted to the “Community Impact” operating model.  This is a multiple year effort which we believe will lead to significantly enhanced value delivered by the TCUW to the region..    The transformation to the Community Impact model will ultimately lead to increased levels of volunteerism and financial contributions to serve the solutions developed for the prioritized list of problems and their root causes within our community..  This cohesive effort should yield important and sustained improvements to the quality of life in our region.

Why consider any change of course?

The most pressing problems in our communities are not substantively improving. We have a downward to neutral trend in funds collected over the past years.  We believe by championing a community-wide effort to identify the most urgent and impactful human services needs within our region and their basic root causes, we can effectively direct resources (people, money, etc) to directly serve improvements and lasting changes to our collective quality of life, but especially to those that are, today, most in need of assistance to survive.. 

This path also gives us more flexibility to deal with situations like the current economic downturn with programs like Food and Fuel where we led with a distribution of $25,000 to existing agencies and coordinated food drives to assist food pantries. Our monies thus far have yielded an additional $55,000 in donations and in-kind services.   We have worked with volunteer groups in individual communities to assist them with providing services to those in need.  We have compiled a 24/7 resource book to put together in one document contact information for those seeking assistance.  In conjunction with ARCC, we held a forum for large employers, to provide them with resource information.  We are distributing over 500 smoke and carbon monoxide detectors at a cost of $13,300.

These types of efforts would not have been undertaken in our previous mode of operation.  We feel very positive about the efforts thus far.  Recent evidence of this occurred with an anonymous donation of $25,000.  The outward communication of our work is being recognized as a central trusted place where your donations can make a difference.

How other United Ways around the country tackled the same challenges?

The Community Impact model is the operating model of choice by the United Way of America and many other local United Ways have converted to this in the last few years.  We found other United Ways around the country were adopting an operating model called Community Impact.  Our reading and interviews thus far have provided many examples of success.  The United Way of Norwalk Connecticut successfully pursued the Community Impact model.  We conducted interview with David Kennedy, their President and CEO, to determine best practices and pitfalls (to avoid).  We are always seeking ways to bring best practices to our community.  We also studied a similar transition by the United Way of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and discussed that work with both their President/CEO and the Chairperson of their Board who is a transitional consultant for the United Way of America.

What is Community Impact?

“Mobilizing our community to create lasting changes in community conditions that improve lives.”  It is far more than centralized fund raising and distribution to service agencies.  It is actively engaging in open communication with the community to identify the most pressing needs and their root causes; then mobilizing, consolidating  and deploying people, time, resources, technology and, yes, money to reduce the root causes and then measurably meet those needs.  It’s a circular process that is always underway.

How we are initially going to proceed?

1.  We will continue to comprehensively study how others have done this successfully, maximize the use of these best practices and use lessons learned by others to avoid pitfalls that could inhibit our progress. 

2.  We will continue our dialog with community partners in delivering value (educators, government, service agencies, foundations, donors, private sector, etc) to communicate our vision and enroll numerous others in the journey. 

3.   We will engage with these partners to identify, compile, analyze and prioritize the human services and other needs of our particular community.  We will identify the primary root causes for the needs and develop multi-faceted solutions.

4.   We will collaboratively develop a plan and schedule to convert to Community Impact based on the values, expectations, and urgency derived from the community engagement.

What does it mean to current agencies?

Funding allocations will gradually transform over time to align with the needs expressed by the community-at-large.  Our partner agencies with be invited to participate in the transformation process.  For the next two campaigns and distribution cycles, it will most likely influence relatively little in the way funds are raised and distributed.  Throughout this time, we will be sharing our findings with current agencies and all stakeholders. 

What is the timeline?

  We are working to determine implementation dates of various initiatives; this is at the moment a work in progress.