Business Model Focused On Community Impact
United Ways across the nation are working with their communities to identify and address the community’s most pressing concerns. In August of 2008, the Board of Directors of United Way of Mat Su, officially adopted a new business model focused on Community Impact. This is a new comprehensive community-wide focus to advance the common good in the Mat-Su Borough, by creating long-lasting positive changes to address the underlying cause of community problems. From a strategic standpoint, this model will include three tactics necessary for success: system change, advocacy, and program investment. To encourage community involvement, United Way is committed to providing opportunities in each of these areas.
As a part of this process we are now setting up Impact Councils to formulate a plan that includes achievable goals, practical strategies, and community indicators to measure how we’re doing as a community. The plan will focus on three critical impact areas United Way considers the building blocks for a good life:
- Education: By focusing on a quality education for our youth and encouraging academic completion, we substantially increase their ability to find a stable job.
- Income: It is absolutely critical families are financially stable and independent. It is impossible for families to be successful without sufficient income to last through retirement.
- Health: Even if people have a quality education and adequate income, it means nothing if they do not have their health.
In addition to these three areas, United Way of Mat-Su will continue supporting a foundation of:
- Essential Services: Responding to basic needs including food, housing, disaster relief, legal services, etc.
- Outreach: Providing information, referral, advocacy and volunteer opportunities through programs such as Alaska 2-1-1 and the United Way of Mat-Su Volunteer Center.
The impact councils will be developing a road map on how to address Mat-Su’s most urgent needs and how to connect community strengths and assets with opportunities to improve our community in a measurable way. We recently completed our 2008 Community Impact Survey and found that the most pressing issues identified were:
- Substance Abuse
- Academic Achievement
- Basic Needs
- Elderly Services & Programs
- Affordable Health Care
These issues fall into our three critical impact areas and will be the focus of Advancing the Common Good Plan.
The United Way of Mat-Su plan will serve as an outline to advance the common good. It is a fluid, ever-evolving call to give, advocate, and volunteer; a call to a collective, focused action that will drive change and produce results in our community. This is all about systems change. It will begin by setting aggressive public goals, then bringing different interests (business, government, labor, non-profits, faith leaders, etc) together to agree on strategies that are truly integrated, next we hold ourselves and our partners accountable publicly and report progress or lack of progress regularly. This approach brings change at the systems level.
It will also be used as a strategic investment guide for the United Way and other organizations in making wise and meaningful charitable giving decisions based on results and impact relating to the issues that matter most to our community. Further, itwill be used as a foundation to build stronger relationships among the business, faith, government, civic, education and nonprofit communities so that, together, we can focus our limited resources for the greatest good.
As mentioned before, we are establishing Impact Councils in three areas of focus: Education, Health and Income. These Councils will to guide the development of an Advancing the Common Good Plan and actions that ensure the United Way aligns its operations and priorities to most effectively carry out community impact efforts.
