Gilroy
– Small community organizations may lose their United Way
funding due to a nationwide restructuring that has county leaders
and community advocates on edge.
Gilroy – Small community organizations may lose their United Way funding due to a nationwide restructuring that has county leaders and community advocates on edge.
“We’re all fearful,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage said recently. “We can’t tell the United Way what to do, but funding certain agencies and not others isn’t necessarily going to solve our problems. It could be bad. Nobody has any money and everybody is suffering.”
United Way Silicon Valley is emulating changes made in the agency across the country in response to dwindling endowment and donors who are unhappy over a series of accounting scandals and want to know where their money is going. Beginning next year, United Way will funnel resources toward specific locations within the county and focus on particular programs. The agency will require organizations to prove the money is being spent successfully.
“Instead of funding 90 agencies, we’re going to focus on funding areas of need that are driven by measurable outcomes,” United Way Silicon Valley CEO Mark Walker said. “People are looking at this as though the sky is falling, but there is a tremendous opportunity regardless of where you are if your focus is on the working poor and self-sufficiency.”
Walker said that a county-wide needs assessment performed by United Way Silicon Valley showed the importance of directing funding toward education, job training and ensuring that the county’s large immigrant population is proficient in English.
“We know the degree to which language is a barrier to success, and we know the areas we can invest and work with others in the community to address that,” Walker said. “With ESL, just providing a course is great but you also better have childcare.”
United Way Silicon Valley will also direct money to the county’s lowest-income neighborhoods, several of which are in Gilroy. Seven percent of the county’s poorest live in Gilroy, a statistic that is actually good news for local agencies that depend on United Way funding.
“We’re moving forward with the United Way with some cautious planning,” said Lisa DeSilva, director of development for Community Solutions in Morgan Hill. “When I look at South County, it could potentially bring some additional dollars because Gilroy is particularly needy. But there could also be some money that gets moved out of South County.”
Last year, the United Way gave Community Solutions about $137,000. That’s a small piece of the agency’s $7.2 million budget, but DeSilva said the funding is critical because it’s still a lot of money that the agency can spend anyway it wants. DeSilva said her greatest fear is that smaller agencies won’t be able to validate their programs.
“It’s easy to report how many women and children stay in a battered women’s shelter. It’s much more involved to say over time what impact the shelter, counseling and legal services have,” she said. “Donors have the right to know that their donations have an impact and what that is, but we’re concerned that most agencies don’t have the funding for sophisticated evaluation methods and will measure what’s easy to measure rather than what’s important.”
It’s exactly that type of agency that has lost funding in the Bay Area according to Eric McDonnell, chief investment officer of United Way Bay Area, which includes San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa and Solano counties. McDonnell’s agency was one of the first to implement the new funding model, in the mid-1990s.
“Your more midsize, sophisticated agencies had the ability to evolve,” McDonnell said. “The smaller grass-roots struggled because they didn’t have the infrastructure and staff to develop measurement tools.”
McDonnell said that funding change is in response to donor demands, but said he didn’t know if the United Way’s fundraising problems are tied more to the bad economy or a series of accounting and embezzlement scandals over the last two decades.
“It’s tough to gauge because we’ve had the unfortunate perfect storm,” he said. “We’ve had bad national press and also a challenging economy, but we don’t know which has been worse.”
He also said the agency is helping more people more effectively since it adopted its new model. United Way Silicon Valley’s program will differ in one important way, however. In Santa Clara County, the United Way will explore cutting funding for certain types of services significantly or entirely.
Although no final decisions have been made, Walker said his agency has identified transportation, affordable housing and senior services as areas that may be better supported elsewhere.
“We recognize that some type of senior assistance is important, but we haven’t determined what that means and we can’t be all things to all people,” Walker said. “Another issue is affordable housing. To what extent can our donors have an impact in an area that’s incredibly expensive to live?”
Colleen Hudgen, executive director of Live Oak Adult Day Services, said she’s worried about maintaining her United Way funding. She said the bulk of the $31,000 it receives each year is invested in the day care program at Wheeler Manor, which each day attends to about 25 seniors who need supervision but are healthy enough to live with family.
“It’s not clear what direction they’re going, but my gut feeling is that seniors won’t be on the front burner,” Hudgen said. “We know everyone is coming back.”
Hudgen said United Way’ s importance extends beyond its financial resources. Despite its tarnished reputation, the agency’s visibility helps Hudgen secure funding from corporations and other agencies.
“We get our foot in the door because of the United Way,” she said. “We’re well known in the community because of the United Way. These resources are keeping communities whole, and if you lose that, you can’t go back.”
Walker said the United Way will continue to fund emergency and crisis services through its social “safety-net” services. The agency’s official strategic plan will be released next week and fundraising based on that will commence in the summer. Funding changes will take effect in July 2006 and be fully implemented the following year.
