The task of doling out the $2.9 million donated to the United Way this year falls to an 11-member committee of volunteers — and it is not a task the group takes lightly.

Craig Yoder and Joan Ketterman, co-chairs of Community Action Team, said the task of reviewing requests for funding is a year-round commitment to ensure the dollars are used efficiently.

"Our team of volunteers really take pride and recognize the responsibility that those donor dollars are really used to the maximum benefit to our community,” Ketterman said.

Last year 22 non-profit organizations representing 43 different programs applied for funding — and numbers are expected to be similar this year.

The United Way begins accepting requests for funding in October each year, and the Community Action Team evaluates every application that comes in to determine if the program seeking support fits within one of the three core focus areas of education, income, or health.

“It is all based on the needs of the community,” Ketterman, a community volunteer who has served on the CAT team for six years, said. “Over the years we’ve developed a process of taking a close look at outcomes and how the programs in the agencies are really meeting the needs of the community.”

The process can be time consuming. The committee is split into smaller teams, and each group reviews approximately 10 to 15 non-profit programs, spending at least an hour reviewing each application.

“The bulk of that hour is to review that application versus the criteria we set to measure all the programs against each other,” Yoder, a food service produce manager at Johnsonville who volunteers on the committee, said.

The committee reviews both the budget for the program and the overall budget and fiscal health of the non-profit submitting the program to the United Way for funding. If it's approved, the committee then looks at how well the program fits into the focus areas of the United Way, and how it is working toward its goals using what they call a "logic model" process.

“I think we have a good core of non-profits in our community, both United Way supported and others, but the logic model process really gives the agency kind of a road map on how to demonstrate that the programs are achieving outcomes,” Ketterman said.

Committee members also do site visits with the non-profits and provide feedback on how programs are performing.

“Once we review the agencies, we sit down with them during contract discussions and provide them with feedback and have that face-to-face dialog,” Yoder said. “We discuss where we see opportunities for them to grow.”

Each organization requests a dollar amount for the program seeking funding, but the United Way ultimately decides what it doles out based on what is donated during the capital campaign. The campaign this year raised $2.9 million, but some of what comes into the campaign is designated dollars, which means the donor chooses which organization or program receives the funding.

The donations left over are distributed to the non-profit programs vetted by the committee.

“If we start putting our money together, the more impact we can have financially and the more impact we can have on our community, because we have joined together, so that is really living united,” O’Hara said.