There will never be enough money to spread around to human service agencies to solve all the problems facing our community and to meet all of the agency's financial needs. United Way cannot be all things to all people without drastically reducing its effectiveness and efficiency in all areas. As a result of the community's expressed desires: United Way's Board of Directors and volunteer leadership agreed that United Way must begin to focus its attention, work and financial investments into the specific human service areas which our community and donors determine are the most crucial issues impacting on our mission to improve the quality of life for all residents.

•  By targeting outcomes to be achieved through investing donor dollars in programs that specifically address our community's critical issues, programs it invests in will be able to effect real, measurable change for the better in the quality of life for our residents.

•  Essentially, it is akin to focus a rifle at a target's bulls eye rather than shooting a BB or pellet gun at the side of a barn. This doesn't mean that you are reducing the amount of ammunition you are using; you just have all the shooters focusing on 1, 2, 3, or 4 very specific targets. The impact must, by the very nature of the beast, be more noticeable and effective.

•  By measuring the impact of what these programs are doing, we will be able to report back to the community and the donor public exactly what return is being produced with their investment.

•  Everyone involved in the arena must be a stockholder and a participant : United Way volunteers and staff, donors, agency directors, program managers, recipients of program services, and other human service programs.

•  This whole process is designed to help the community focus on what it is today, what it wants to be tomorrow and what it will take to get there. There must be buy-in of the realization that unless we all focus our efforts on what really matters , give up the status quo to the extent that it perpetuates the same-old-same-old way of doing business and approaching problems and challenges, then we will all – sooner rather than later – become obsolete.

•  Through the community needs assessment, the public has told us what their issues and concerns are. The community must adopt its vision and core values. United Way and everyone else in the process must take these issues/values/targets and convert them into a listing of what we will target with our donors' money .

Focus areas of the Community Impact Agenda

Basic Needs

Quality, Affordable Housing

Affordable Health Care

Quality, Affordable Child Care & Youth Services

Donor Investment Committee - This committee is a group of community, volunteer representatives from Hinds, Madison and Rankin counties who basically have three functions:

•  Invest the dollars raised during the annual campaign to qualified agency programs and community initiatives.

•  Monitor the programs and budgets of the participating agencies for accountability purposes.

•  Conduct an in-depth review of program outcomes and make funding decisions based upon those outcomes.

The four committees meet at least once to discuss funding proposals and make allocations decisions during late spring/early summer. Volunteers also will have the opportunity to “adopt” one or more programs, which consists of reviewing program outcome reports and accompanying United Way staff on site visits to the program. This enables each volunteer to gain deeper insight into the programs and helps the committee as a whole make better funding decisions.

For more information, please contact:

Ira E. Murray

601-965-1352

ira@myunitedway.com