United Way is about a lot of things: creating awareness; helping people in need; helping our partner agencies; building coalitions; forging partnerships; and strengthening our collective volunteerism throughout our communities. While the face of United Way takes on many looks, it is probably safe to say United Way is really about one thing…working to change lives in a meaningful manner.

Recently, your United Way completed a strategic planning exercise. We included a wide array of people in this process, including current and past board members as well as leaders from our businesses, education systems, and governments. We believe we involved a good cross section of our community in helping to review what we should be as an organization and help define our future focus. Critical in this process, we ensured that our donor base was well represented and heard.

Internally, this process helped us fine tune our vision, strengthen organizational governance, restructure operations for mission focus and efficiency, and align operations with long term strategy. However, the most important aspect of this process centered on how our organization should help our communities as we move forward.

Throughout this process, two main questions dominated most of our time and conversation: how do we determine what is important to focus on and how do we work to address the issues identified (distribute funds)?

To answer the first question, what is important, we are taking a two-step strategy. Initially, we will continue to focus on what has previously been identified as important to our community. Longer term, we will use periodic community surveys to help re-define priorities.

Currently, our work is focused on the building blocks for life success: youth education, financial stability and independence, and health. Moving forward, we are exploring, along with other key community stakeholders, the possibility of implementing a comprehensive needs assessment process which we will use to help define our future focus.

The basis for this needs assessment process has been successfully implemented in other Wisconsin communities. Typically the surveys are conducted every several years and because they are comprehensive in nature, the results are used throughout the community in the education, government, social welfare arenas as well as for business development and recruitment systems.

Regarding how we work to address the issues identified as community needs: the strategic planning process confirmed that we should continue implementing the community impact funding model, which has also been successfully implemented by other United Way organizations throughout Wisconsin and the United States.  

What this means is that rather than only working to provide funding for needs based services, in situations that permit, your United Way will instead work as a change agent to eliminate the root cause of the need.

We are working to create community wide “vision councils” for each of the three need areas mentioned above (education, income, and health) and each council will work together to explore the needs and identify potential solutions for the root causes. This includes identifying current and prospective programs, helping forge community partnerships to provide deeper and broader solutions, identifying additional funding sources, and re-aligning the United Way’s donor investments.  

I believe our Executive Director, Jon Doll, has summarized the reason for this journey and change process the best: “We are here to help create sustainable change in our community through effectively facilitating community resources, convening broad dialogue and focusing on areas of highest need,” meaning the work of United Way is less about helping one person at a time and more about changing systems to help all of us.

Because of all of our partners and volunteers, we are well on our journey of working to create sustainable change. It will take time, be arduous at times, but worthwhile and life-changing in the end.

Tony Klockow is the Board President of the United Way of Sheboygan County Board of Directors