Agenda for Change
Presented here is our community-wide Agenda for Change, an aggressive plan with goals to advance the common good in our community. It is a fluid, ever-evolving call to collective, focused action that will drive change and produce results in our community. By working together toward a common goal, we can change systems to help all of us.
Read the full plan here.
Click here for a full list of program investments under the 2011/2012 plan.
Click here to apply for one-time only funds.
Goals
Volunteers, community partners, and key stakeholders spent a year and a half creating and pinpointing the most pressing issues in our community. They then laid out realistic strategies to begin attacking these issues at the root causes. In this new plan, we have chosen to focus on three goals, the building blocks for a good life:
Education -- Preparing children to enter and graduate from school
Income -- Promoting financial stability
Health -- Improve people’s health and wellness
We all win when a child succeeds in school, when families are financially stable, and when people are healthy. Additionally, the Agenda includes a foundation of:
Essential Services -- Responding to basic needs including food, housing, disaster relief, legal services, etc.
Outreach -- Providing information, referral, and volunteer opportunities.
Strategies and Capacity to Achieve our Goals
In order to achieve this ambitious work, the Agenda includes three types of strategies necessary for success:
- Program investment
- Convening/mobilizing to bring about systemic change
- Advocacy
Additionally, we have staff experts in each areas as well as more than 80 volunteers who are driving this work. We also rely strongly on our network of partners (funded and not funded) to deliver the necessary services and to advocate with us. And finally, we are incredibly lucky to have an annual campaign that generates roughly $13 million. That money is essential to our program investments.
Measuring Progress
Every program United Way funds is evaluated annually on program outcomes. This gives us a sense of the achievements of each individual program. Community indicators on the other hand are a more collective look at what's being accomplished collaboratively as a community. While United Way has identified community indicators, it is too early to accurately measure progress.
To learn more about the difference your gift is making, please download our 2010 Annual Report.
