As featured in the Denton Record-Chronicle 10/4/2017 by Jenna Duncan, Staff Writer...
The United Way of Denton County 2017 is fundamentally different than it was when Gary Henderson came on board as CEO in 2011.
The following year, in 2012, the nonprofit's board of directors made a philosophy switch: United Way needed to do more than vet and fund nonprofits in the area. The organization should lead the way for the county in macro-social work: Building systems, processes and oversight where none exist.
"Our 2012 strategic plan articulated a five-year vision where we would expand collective impact work, which you can think of as collaboration on steroids but it's very structured collaboration," Henderson said. "We will continue to fundraise, and we need to grow that ... but at the same time we're going to grow our capacity to be an active agent. We want to convene people, we want to be backbone support, we want to coordinate and facilitate."
To guide its work, the organization has released its 2017 Community Needs Assessment, which was last completed in 2011. Overall, the report shows the United Way staff a lot of things it needs to work on through high-impact statistics, such as 62 percent of Denton County kindergarteners didn't attend pre-K and half of the homeless population in Denton is working.
The 108-page report highlights five areas that United Way remains focused on: children, families, veterans, homeless/housing and health/mental health. With data gathered from various organizations, service providers and people who are already receiving services, United Way has a guided document to what the community needs most.
"As an organization, both our board of directors and staff are very committed to quantitative and qualitative data informing our decisions about how to deploy donated dollars to meet needs in Denton County," Henderson said. "The needs assessment gives our board and our staff high competence that we were targeting precisely the most critical needs."
In community conversations, surveys and focus groups, the report highlights five major areas of concern.
The most mentioned was homelessness and housing needs, ranging from housing affordability to mental health needs for people who are experiencing homelessness.
"Homelessness is not a box you check on a tax form, so it's really difficult to measure," said Courtney Cross, director of homelessness initiatives. "It's tricky to actually quantify, and then from there measure the performance of different programs and resources throughout the community."
Cross is continuing to work on building these data sets locally and helped guide area nonprofits to use the same intake system so the data is uniform and case managers can most effectively guide people to the resources they need.
Transportation was the second most mentioned issue, with many people concerned about the cost and time of using public transportation. Also, for people anywhere outside of the city of Denton, there's less accessibility.
There needs to be more collaboration in the community, so organizations can avoid duplicating services and rally together when a service provider closes, the report said.
Health care access was also determined as a top need in the survey, with specific needs for women's health, dental care for adults and more mental health providers.
Next is vocational education and job skill training, and United Way is working to develop more programs. The group said it hopes to launch a program in January called Working Families Success, where people can work on certificate programs at North Central Texas College while receiving other services. The goal is for them to be able to move into jobs that pay $13 to $14 an hour, instead of minimum wage ($7.25).
"It's a holistic approach for working poor families," said Alicia Froidl, director of education and workforce initiatives. "We'll help them stay in school and complete that and also help them learn once they complete this what money management looks like."
JENNA DUNCAN can be reached at 940-566-6889.