United Way Worldwide

United Way Worldwide (UWW) is a leadership organization serving a U.S. network of 1,259 local United Way (LUW) organizations, including 22 United Way statewide associations (United Way SA). UWW’s mission is to improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of communities to advance the common good in education, health, and income.

United Way Worldwide (UWW) supports local work through programmatic leadership; a best practices infrastructure; peer learning; evaluation; training and learning programs; grant funding; and national education, income and health initiatives. UWW invests in the three building blocks of life: health, education, and financial stability — to achieve its mission to improve lives by mobilizing the caring power of communities to advance the common good.

To accomplish these goals, United Way is mobilizing individuals and organizations to give, advocate, and volunteer in these key areas, and has created research-based national action plans. UWW works with national partners and its network to thread the three impact areas together (Education, Financial Stability, Health) to ensure that communities support optimal development for children and families.

Reason for Joining NREC

A robust and commonly supported data Infrastructure is essential in local collaborations. And to the extent that the local coalitions of NREC partners share common goals and are focused on the same population via different entry points (Promise Neighborhoods, Campaign for Grade Level Reading, Coalition for Community Schools or United Ways), they all need data for tracking, learning, continuous improvement and shared accountability. * With such a powerful confluence of interests, not every community or partner should have to figure out and spend valuable non-profit resources to figure out and build a relevant, useful data system.

Furthermore, the potential of rolling up all these related collaboratives’ findings and results to the national and state level presents opportunities for national and state-level policy changes to support population-level results for children and their families.

Data is vital and serves to help improve and hold accountable stakeholders/partners. The NREC RBA data framework embraces important indicators that will be applied across all national partners and their networks’ local communities.

How currently using NREC tools

I Increasing numbers of local United Ways across the country are using the Scorecard as part of their community impact work, whether that be grade level reading, Promise Neighborhood, or other coalition work. United Way Worldwide sees work with NREC as an opportunity to provide more guidance to local United Ways about shared data systems while also considering and planning for a data system to be understand the work of local UWs and chart the individual and collective progress of our network.

Anticipated contributions to NREC work

UWW will work with NREC partners to identify and connect communities, share lessons learned from UWs using community level data systems, participate in NREC meetings and activities, including working with cohorts of communities, and collaborate on funding and other key opportunities.

Contact Information

Samantha Wigand
615.414.0839
[email protected]

Kitty Hsu Dana
703.836.7112
[email protected]