Subscribe in a reader or in an email subscription below.United Way Donors
Make a Difference
ABC-7 Anchor Cheryl Jennings produced a great news segment about SparkPoint and 2-1-1, which are central to United Way’s efforts to create pathways out of poverty. Watch the video below, or visit the ABC-7 website to see a text version of the news story.
Recently, The San Francisco Chronicle invited United Way share our perspective about how Bay Area families, and the nonprofits who serve them, are coping with the economic crisis.
United Way Chief Executive Officer Anne Wilson and VP of Community Investments Lorne Needle wrote an opinion editorial for the newspaper, describing how United Way programs — like 2-1-1 and SparkPoint — are helping families get on the road to recovery:
Charities get creative in unusually hard times
Making ends meet has not been easy for Scott Whitney and his family. The California state employee lost a significant portion of his income this year when the governor ordered furloughs to help address the state budget gap. Despite taking a second job on weekends, the resident of American Canyon, Napa County, and father of two recently fell behind on auto-loan payments and had to trade in his family’s car for a much less reliable used vehicle. With four family members to feed and a mortgage to pay, Whitney was soon falling behind on his utility bills, too. Read more…
Tse Ming Tam joined United Way of The Bay Area in September 2006 and oversees our grant making in the East Bay. He is also responsible for the development of our SparkPoint Initiative, which helps low-income families achieve financial stability.
United Way: What part of your job do you enjoy the most?
Tse Ming: I’ve really enjoyed building new programs from the ground up – like SparkPoint – which can make a real difference in people’s lives. Economically-disadvantaged people have such limited opportunities; usually they have only “bad choices” or “worse choices” they can make. SparkPoint is all about providing low-wage workers and families with the opportunity to make good choices. Bringing together all the pieces and partners to build SparkPoint has been very rewarding. SparkPoint Oakland Center has been open for just a few months, and we’re already starting to see members take significant steps towards being more financially stable.
United Way: What is the biggest challenge that our community is facing?
Tse Ming: It’s no secret that the economic crisis is having a huge impact on the low-wage families in our community, especially because they were already struggling to make ends meet. But there’s a whole new group of people who are asking for help now, and the nonprofits trying to meet the huge surge in demand are being overwhelmed.
Fortunately, some nonprofits are recognizing this as an opportunity to change and re-evaluate the way they work. In addition to seeing families asking for help for the first-time in their lives, agencies are seeing clients whom they helped years ago returning for help, essentially having to start over. It’s causing nonprofit organizations to rethink how they are helping clients. They’re asking, can we provide better services so that clients can survive and endure both the ups and downs of the economy once they leave our agency?
United Way: What is the best-kept secret about United Way?
Tse Ming: The role United Way has as a change agent – we are bringing tools and resources together to make things happen in our community. People have a misperception that we are only giving grants. They still learning about all of the other powerful “muscles” that we use to achieve community impact, including our role as a convener, our public policy work, and the direct service provided by our community projects.
United Way: What do you do for fun in your spare time?
Tse Ming: I enjoy the outdoors, including camping, hiking, skiing and hang gliding. I still want to learn how to SCUBA dive. I also enjoy brain-challenging games, like Soduko.
Before joining United Way, Tse Ming spent more than 10 years at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, a national research, consulting and legal organization dedicated to building economic health and opportunity in vulnerable communities. Prior to that, Tse Ming served as the director for Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), a non-profit civil rights advocacy organization. During his tenure, CAA received President Clinton’s Community Excellence Award.
Tse Ming lives in Pinole and has resided in the Bay Area since 1983. He is a graduate of the New College of San Francisco with a B.A. in activism and social change.
Caroline Mack said she thought she was going to jail, because that’s what the creditors were telling her.
Her husband took care of everything, so when he died two years ago, things quickly began to deteriorate for the 52-year-old mother of two.
The Belize native said she’s not sure where she’d be now if she hadn’t found the American Canyon Family Resource Center. But through several of the center’s new SparkPoint services, funded through United Way of the Bay Area, she said she’s feeling more hopeful these days.
“I come here and I get lessons, I get work experience, they’re really, really good people,” she said. “They’re patient, compassionate; they listen to you, what you need. Coming here every Wednesday makes me feel alive again.”
Mack, who said she’s been in the United States 35 years, walks to the Family Resource Center each week, because she has no car. But through SparkPoint, Mack said she’s getting credit counseling, the threatening phone calls are dwindling, and she’s moving forward with her life.
Mack is also learning to improve her reading and writing skills, she said. It’s one of the many services now available through a newly minted holistic approach being applied by United Way, center executive director Sherry Tennyson said.
“United Way will eventually have seven SparkPoint centers,” she said. “Oakland was the first to come on line and ours was second.”
Read the entire article, SparkPoint inspires renewed hope among struggling clients, which appeared in both the Times-Herald and the Contra Costa Times.
…make lemonade. That’s the strategy many Bay Area nonprofits are employing during the recession, finding opportunities to collaborate when they find their own resources depleted.
The surge in nonprofit collaboration is one of several insights shared by United Way CEO Anne Wilson during a recent interview with the San Francisco Examiner. She also answered questions about United Way’s recent accomplishments and described the attributes of a good leader. United Way’s recent launch of the SparkPoint Centers in Oakland and American Canyon was also discussed during the interview.
Watch the entire interview by clicking on Anne’s photo above.
Janet Lamkin visits business owner Teena Johnson, a graduate of the Women’s Initiative, a United Way grantee
Following her successful term as vice-chair during the 2008/9 fundraising year, Janet Lamkin, president of Bank of America California, takes the helm as chair of United Way’s 2009/10 Bay Area fundraising campaign.
“This is a critical time for the nonprofit organizations that United Way supports,” Janet says. “Contributions are down at precisely the time when the need for vital services is at an all time high. No organization is better equipped than United Way to meet this challenge and ensure the continued vitality and sustainability of our communities.”
Janet is working with United Way to create brighter futures for Bay Area families. United Way creates pathways to prosperity, promoting long-term recovery and self-sufficiency for people in need in our community. People like Teena Johnson and her family.
A graduate of the Women’s Initiative, mother of-three Teena Johnson went from a frustrated, food-services worker to a proud owner of a successful lunch counter in downtown Oakland, “Catered to You.” Not only did the program offer her the business training she needed, but it also provided a positive environment,and support
The Women’s Initiative is one of several partners in United Way’s SparkPoint Oakland Center. SparkPoint brings together nonprofit organizations that promote financial stability and
business ownership for low-income individuals and their families.
Teena is now living her dream of running and growing a business, while also giving back to the community. Last year, she distributed Christmas dinners to 148 families in need, partnering with neighboring businesses to prepare food, solicit financial donations and organize volunteers. She hopes to expand the program to feed more families this year.
For Janet Lamkin, as it is for all of us at United Way, stories like Teena’s are the reason why we love what we do, and why, especially in these trying economic times, we are motivated to push harder and reach higher in our fundraising goals.
Recently, SparkPoint American Canyon Center was profiled in the Contra Costa Times. The article highlights some of the services offered, including job search assistance, credit counseling, and helping people becoming financially literate so they can take control of their finances and their lives.
SparkPoint American Canyon Center is currently in its pilot phase, and is one of seven centers that United Way plans to launch with our partners around the Bay Area. SparkPoint Oakland Center has been serving people since March 30.
Read more about SparkPoint America Canyon Center in the Contra Costa Times here.
In the video above, SparkPoint Oakland Center client Fatou tells how an Individual Development Account, which is a matched savings account, is making a huge difference in her life.
Women's Initiative Graduate Teena Johnson inside Cater to You, in Downtown Oakland.
Helping ordinary people build new businesses is critical to our economic recovery, and one of the many goals of United Way’s Road to Recovery Campaign.
At United Way’s SparkPoint Oakland Center, we are doing exactly that - working with low-income individuals and their families to address financial-stability issues and helping them pursue dreams of owning their own businesses.
SparkPoint Oakland Center brings together a number of nonprofit organizations that each contribute to its success. One of these partners, The Women’s Initiative for Self Employment has been “assisting high-potential, low-income women who dream of business ownership” since 1988. Gruaduates of their intensive 20-session program have started and expanded over 1,600 businesses from photography studios to catering companies and mechanic shops.
We recently had a chance to meet one of their graduates, Teena Johnson at Catered To You, the business she owns and operates in downtown Oakland. She is a perfect example of the kind of success Women’s Initiative has been able to achieve. With their help she was able to go from frustrated and under-employed to a business owner who last year, organized a food drive that handed out 148 meals to some of the homeless people around her downtown Oakland store.
Thanks to partners like Women’s Initiative, SparkPoint Oakland is well on its way towards helping move people along the path towards economic self-sufficiency.
Read Teena’s entire story here
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=eed179db-f982-4623-8d7b-317b7efbd992)
This is the first of a new feature that we hope to have every Friday in which we share all the links we’ve come across over the course of the last week that deal with issues important to our community, or our work. We’re calling it Hot Links Friday.
We hope you find them as useful as we have, enjoy.
(Some of these links are to newspapers and may expire)
UNITED WAY OF THE BAY AREA IN THE NEWS
American Canyon Family Resource Center other agencies helping financially strapped
Times-Herald
As part of the United Way’s SparkPoint program, the center offers many free services at the center, including financial coaching, job placement, credit repair and foreclosure assistance, the flier notes.
“This is a pilot program that’s supposed to help people increase their income, improve their credit and develop or build assets,” center case manager Alma Medina said. A SparkPoint program for Solano County is in the planning stages, United Way spokeswoman Aimee Durfee said.
Deal of the day: LIVE UNITED sports packages
SF Chronicle Dollars and Sense blog
Scroll down to “Deal of the day” at the bottom of the screen
INCOME
Foreclosure pipline grows in the Bay Area
CC Times
Distressed activity builds after slow down from moratoriums
Families of small business owners feel pinch as state cuts ripple out
SF Chronicle
Bankruptcy Workshop
On Thursday, August 20th, hosted by the Family Economic Success Workshop.
Opinion: Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?
NY Times
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more of it.
‘Cash for clunkers’ effort hurts nonprofits
SF Chronicle
Education
Nonprofit leadership at a crossroads: Interview with CompassPoint CEO Jeanne Bell
SF Examiner
RESILIENT COMMUNTIES/HEALTH
And You Thought a Prescription Was Private
NY Times
Prescriptions and the information on them are bought and sold in a murky marketplace, often without the patients’ knowledge or permission.
Open Forum: Higher co-pay, fewer prescriptions filled
SF Chronicle
Thousands Line Up for Promise of Free Health Care
NY Times
When Remote Area Medical, the Tennessee-based organization running the event, decided to try its hand at large urban medical services, its principals thought Los Angeles would be a good place to start. But they were far from prepared for the outpouring of need. Set up for eight days of care, the group was already overwhelmed on the first day after allowing 1,500 people through the door, nearly 500 of whom had still not been served by day’s end and had to return in the wee hours Wednesday morning.
Forum to discuss Home Support Services
Marin IJ
A forum for people to learn more about In Home Support Services and how budget cuts will affect the program.
Anne joined United Way of the Bay Area in 1980, and was named the first female CEO in 2000. Under her leadership, United Way has transformed into a community-impact organization that brings together resources and people to address the Bay Area’s most pressing challenges.
Anne Wilson talks with Dr. Nadine Burke at Bayview Child Health Center. Click the photo to learn more about this United Way grantee.
United Way: What is the best kept secret about United Way?
Anne: Because of United Way’s size and scope, people don’t always understand or appreciate how closely we work with grassroots nonprofits. Even though we’re headquartered in down town San Francisco, our staff and volunteers have their fingers on the pulse of the nonprofit community, all the way down to the smallest nonprofits, that operate in neighborhoods and small communities throughout the region.
Two great examples of this are recent Road to Recovery grants we made to the food pantry at the San Geronimo Community Center in West Marin and the RotaCare Clinc in Half Moon Bay. In both cases, we made small grants that made a huge difference to those smaller, rural communities. In the first case, we enabled the community center to change its policy to allow people to stop by once a week instead of every other week for food, since they are now seeing so many new faces in line alongside the regulars. Our grant to the RotaCare Clinic enabled hundreds of coast side residents without insurance to continue receiving medical care after another clinic in the area, which served more than 8,000 residents, closed.
So, while we’re often recognized for the big dollars that we raise in our annual campaign, the strength of organization is built on our connections and work with the grass roots nonprofits.
United Way: What do you like most about your job?
Anne: The diversity of people that I work with over the course of a day – from our talented staff to our volunteer business and labor partners to the front-line non-profit and public sector professionals who serve our community– it is so rewarding to see how many different people and perspectives are needed to generate impact in our community. It is very rewarding to learn from, and collaborate with, so many great people. All are enthusiastically giving their time and talents to make the Bay Area a better place.
United Way: What is the biggest challenge facing United Way?
Anne: Like most other nonprofits, it is the economic environment. We have to do more with less at a time when the community has increasing needs. We are working as hard as possible to generate the resources needed, and to leverage every last dime.
Through our Road to Recovery campaign, United Way is making a special appeal to the community to give during these tough times so that we can help low-wage families, who are hit hardest during the downturn.
United Way: What do you do for fun?
Anne: I spend time with my two kids, my husband and our three dogs. We love to mountain bike in China Camp State Park, which is near our home.
As CEO, Anne has championed the development of several United Way programs, including:
Anne has a Master’s of Social Welfare degree from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science degree from Syracuse University. She lives in San Rafael, California.
Bad Behavior has blocked 232 access attempts in the last 7 days.
