What Do We Mean by "Community Impact?"

Agenda for Change

Traditionally, United Way has improved lives by mobilizing the financial resources of businesses, employees, foundations and others to support programs that provide direct services to individuals and families.

While we remain committed to this important work, it is not enough.

Despite all of the money raised and all of the services we and others helped provide, many problems in our community are growing.  While we provide programs to help youth build character and skills, a large percentage of them don't graduate from high school and move toward their desired goals.  While many adults are provided job training, too many don't attain and retain jobs.

Many factors contribute to these and other issues facing our community-economic conditions, public and private sector practices, and disconnections among community systems-to name a few.  To address these issues, there is a need to deal with the conditions that created them in the first place.  Doing so calls for a new approach for United Way in addition to the traditional, direct service approach.

This new model involves mobilizing our community's many resources beyond what is pledged through the annual campaign.  It calls for community and agency partners working together to change the conditions and improve the lives not just of program clients, but of community populations.  This is what we call community impact.

In January of 2006, United Way of Forsyth County's Board of Directors approved this exciting new approach to having significantly greater impact on the major human service issues facing our region and the result is the new Community Impact Agenda.

In developing the Agenda, we engaged United Way volunteers, key community stakeholders, community and agency partners, and other service funders and providers to identify our community's most pressing issues.  We would like to thank these many caring individuals for their considerable dedication to this Agenda and our community.

Please click here to review Guidelines, Priority Issues, and Outcomes and Indicators.