Community Impact
What is Community Impact?
Near the end of 2003 the United Way of Canada (Centraide Canada) - after a consultative process with all UW's across the country decided that it was time to transform all UW's from fund raising organizations to community impact organizations. The vision of the National United Way was for all UWays across Canada to continue to be fund raisers but in addition, to become more involved in their communities by providing the appropriate leadership to find root causes and solutions to the community's most pressing human and social issues.
Today many UW's across Canada have now two fundamental core functions:
- Funding raising
- Community impact/issues management
United Way of Greater Victoria along with many other United Way's across Canada signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the United Way of Canada making a commitment to this journey - for making it happen.
UWGV began this journey in 2004 - undertaking a best practices review of philanthropic organizations and other UW's throughout the world who had embarked on similar journeys. By the end of 2007 the following significant changes occurred:
We completed an extensive community engagement process - asking Greater Victoria citizens and organizations - what are the most pressing human and social issues that you want us to deal with. The community was clear - change your 5 priorities and focus on 3 impact areas:
- Family and Community Well-being
- Housing for Homeless, Low Income and Working Poor
- Mental Health and Addictions
Based on this community feedback process we also revamped our entire approach to fund distribution. We learned from our community engagement process that the community needed to be actively engaged in funding distribution decisions and developing both short and long term strategies to address these critical issues. So we listened again and set up our Community Impact Council structure and supporting Community Cabinet - consisting of volunteer community leaders and those with knowledge and experience in the impact areas to guide the United Way in developing strategies and solutions and to appropriately prioritize and distribute dollars to those pressing needs.
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