Where the Money Goes…
By Jan Sherrell
So what happens after I make a gift to Metro United Way’s Community Action Fund?
I like to think of the Community Action Fund as an “investment in our community.” For example: the money that comes out of my paycheck for retirement gets invested by experts, people that know the market and do that work for a living. Donations to the Community Action Fund are the same – those dollars are invested by staff and volunteers who study community needs, agencies that provide help for people and the work that those agencies do.
A minimal amount of these dollars help fund special initiatives in the counties we serve (the majority of funding for these projects comes from other sources). Every county has a committee of local volunteers who help determine the right focus for their community. Some examples are dental screenings, developmental asset surveys, or financial stability education.
The great majority of Community Action Fund dollars go to agencies to help meet a broad range of needs in our regional community. Before dollars are routed to agencies, their performance and general health are reviewed.
A group of volunteers called the Program Review Team makes funding recommendations. The Program Review Team is recruited for their skills and knowledge about a range of community issues such as education, mental health, measuring outcomes and passion for the community. They review written reports that agencies submit, called Investment Proposals. These 10-40 page documents (!!!) detail an agency’s challenges, successes, learnings and the work they do. Volunteers learn even more by visiting the agencies, meeting clients and board members.
Here is a sampling of the information collected in agency Investment Proposals:
- Financial stability
- Efforts to identify, maximize and leverage resources
- Collaborations
- Results – changes in the clients’ lives
- Clients served and client conditions
- What an agency has learned from the past year
- Diversity and Inclusion
It is wonderful when something volunteers learned from one agency can be shared with another agency. There have been many such occasions. Agency A had luck garnering a grant so we made the connection for them to share their experience with agency B, or data that agency C collected proved valuable to agency D doing similar work.
Metro United Way funds outcomes – which is the change in a person’s life. Funding may go to increase a youth’s school attendance through a mentoring program, or to better inform a father on how to deal with his son’s addiction. These changes are tracked and reported for our review.
These comments from Jefferson Alcohol & Drug Abuse Center director, Diane Hague, really explain outcomes best.
When we first started attending Metro United Way trainings about outcomes, my first reaction was “More hoops to jump through for Metro United Way.” After looking at what we would need to do in order to conform to the new requirements about outcomes, the light bulb came on. I understood. Why would anyone want to pay for something if they didn’t know what the outcomes were? We began looking at what we wanted for outcomes and what the best way was to gather that info. Then another light bulb- why not do this for all of our programs? So we have Metro United Way to thank for jump starting us into thinking about what it was we were looking for in terms of outcomes in all of our programs.
How do we know we are truly making a change in the clients’ lives? We continue to make needed changes as a result of the survey responses.”
Keep an eye out for future blog posts where we’ll talk more about how we fund Metro United Way’s own initiatives such as Success By 6 and 2-1-1!
What other funding questions to you have?
