United Way Partners with UNC Charlotte Urban Institute on Five County Needs Assessment

Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Jane McIntyre

At United Way, we talk about “creating lasting change for those most in need.”  Fulfilling that mission requires not just measurement of community needs, but a source of data that is sufficiently comprehensive to ensure that changes are far-reaching and can be tracked over time.

Yet for many years, no such resource existed.  Certainly there was plenty of data being put to good use, but no avenue to bring it all together and make sense of the broad picture across the full five-county region that this United Way serves.

As we’ve embarked on reinventing United Way, we’ve done a lot of listening to executives at the nonprofit agencies that we partner with, as well as leaders in the community as a whole.  It was clear that United Way needed to step up to fill this resource gap, but we don’t have the staff for such a far-reaching initiative.  That is why we’re teaming up with the experts in this area, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, to conduct a comprehensive, five-county needs assessment. 

This study will be broader in scope than any assessment previously undertaken in our region.  It will incorporate a wealth of existing and current studies that have recently been completed.  We will also be inviting experts to serve on panels to examine all of the data from the assessment – specialists from area universities, service providers, governments, school systems, and the health and mental health fields.  They will help us identify gaps and overlaps in service delivery and recommend best practices in delivering services.

In particular, these experts will help us identify “trigger points” – the critical times and places where we can intervene and help create change that will turn around a situation, leading to successful results in the lives of the people helped by your dollars.

As the needs assessment process unfolds over the next 9 to 11 months, we will also bring our findings out into the communities we serve, inviting every interested person to come to a local forum.  There, you will learn about the health and human service needs in your community and learn how we might work together to help change lives.

The opportunities for community impact extend beyond United Way – through this partnership with the Urban Institute, we will make the needs assessment data available via an interactive webpage portal.  The Urban Institute will continuously update this data to provide local nonprofits, the faith community, community groups and local governments the information they need to plan and provide for health and human services.

Thus, the needs assessment will be United Way’s gift to not just our agency partners, but to the region as a whole.  We also greatly appreciate the support of the Knight Foundation in making this possible.

The timing is right to launch this initiative.  Tremendous changes are taking place in our region and having an impact on the delivery of health and human services.  The economic downturn brought an unprecedented level of unemployment to the Charlotte region, and with it an unprecedented number of people needing help.  Foreclosures are up.  Homelessness is up.  Hunger is up.

The community is responding generously, and staffs at agencies are making superhuman efforts to meet the need.  But we cannot focus on just the here and now, we have to get ahead of the curve if we are to best serve the children, families and individuals in need across Anson, Cabarrus, Iredell, Mecklenburg and Union counties as a whole.

We are committed to doing so, and with the help of the Urban Institute, your United Way dollars will be invested with greater strategic focus, and to more lasting impact, than ever before.

Executive Director