Case Study #11: United Way of Massachusetts Bay

CASE STUDY #11: UNITED WAY OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY

Foundation Funding of CO: How one United Way agency set criteria for rating funding proposals.

The United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB) in Boston is a fundraising federation that operates special grantmaking and other programs. In 1999, it raised and distributed $35.7 million to affiliated agencies and non-affiliated nonprofit organizations serving 80 communities in the greater Boston area. Increasingly, this innovative United Way agency is focusing its resources in ways that emphasize resident participation in community affairs.

One of the driving forces behind the United Way's approach is Marilyn Anderson Chase, UWMB's senior vice president in charge of community investments. As a former executive director of Boston's well-known Roxbury Multi-Service Center, she strongly believes that community-based agencies should not just deliver services, but also provide a means for neighborhood residents to express and act on community concerns. Since 1997, she has been working with United Way staff in Boston to advance a community building agenda, one that increasingly embraces CO as an important, indeed indispensable, component of community revitalization.

The new orientation, which Chase points out had been in the works for several years prior to her arrival, builds on John McKnight's work emphasizing the importance of community assets - rather than a community needs - focus. In Chase's view, the "mainstreaming" of McKnight's work has opened up new ways for United Ways and other charitable efforts to engage and improve communities. Principal among them is the encouragement and support of efforts that involve community residents in a process of collective action and community problem solving.

Unusual for most fundraising federations, the UWMB has a new set of community involvement criteria that staff and volunteers use to rate agency affiliation proposals. Chase explains the shift in UWMB's thinking:

Old-style agencies need to talk with us differently now. They need to tell us how they are working with the community to achieve community-defined goals. With community building as a clear new focus, we at the United Way have come to see organizing's value in helping a community figure out its assets, strengths, and concerns, and in developing action strategies to move the community towards it goals and aspirations.

Each new agency proposing affiliation with the UWMB is now rated to see if it fulfills the following criteria.

1. Citizen Participation. The agency regards the people in its community as residents, as opposed to clients who need services. The agency sponsors or facilitates activities that promote civic involvement, community or cultural pride, and/or neighborhood development (e.g., small community problem-solving, parents' councils, voter registration, etc.).
2. CO. The agency strives to mobilize people in the community and help them realize their collective power to effect change, gain social and political influence, and help ensure access to public and private resources (e.g., large collective action).
3. Leadership Development. The agency encourages residents or members of the community to become active leaders and participants in their communities and neighborhoods, and provides opportunities for leadership positions within its own organization.
4. Advocacy. The agency engages in activities that influence public policy decisions that in turn strengthen families and neighborhoods.

UWMB has a Neighborhood/Community Building Fund through which it channels some of its discretionary dollars to support CO efforts. Listed below are grants the Fund made in 1999.

• Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO). Founded in 1996, the GBIO is a partnership between IAF and the Organizing and Leadership Training Center. It brings together more than 80 member congregations, community organizations, social-service agencies, and labor unions to develop local leadership, identify community issues and concerns, and mobilize action on social justice issues affecting low- and moderate-income people. GBIO actions have focused on affordable housing and public school reform. Its accomplishments include more than 3,000 one-on-one and small group discussions with residents of Greater Boston, the development of an action agenda stressing affordable housing and school improvement, commitments from area banks to finance more than 2,000 low interest rate mortgages, and the initiation of a Boston Youth Organizing Project to involve and support youth leaders in public school reform and community change activities. The United Way awarded a $25,000 general operating support grant to support GBIO's organizing and leadership development efforts.
• Low-Income Welfare Organizing Collaborative (LIWOC). Formed in 1998 as a collaborative of ten greater Boston area groups with low-income leadership and organizing missions, the LIWOC seeks to build a cohesive group that ensures low- income people have the tools they need to build a more positive future. They are concerned about the impact of Massachusetts' two-year time limit on welfare benefits on low-income women, and limited access to meaningful job training and education. The United Way facilitated LIWOC's formation and subsequent development, first through a generous planning grant and then through a $50,000 operating support grant. The Collaborative developed a plan to build low-income women's power and leadership on relevant policy issues, with community education, institutional outreach, and action strategy components.
• The Mattapan Community Partnership. The United Way is taking a proactive stance to help the Mattapan community get organized for community power and neighborhood improvement. The Partnership brings together into one coordinating body all of the public and nonprofit agencies, community groups and civic associations to help plan how public and private resources can best be used to serve the Mattapan community. Much of the Partnership's work will involve CO, action research, agency coordination and outreach, and other activities to build a stronger community that is better able to articulate its needs, to hold institutions more accountable to those needs, and to make more efficient use of existing resources. Its operating premise is that, unless the Mattapan community gets organized, public and private agencies will continue to neglect the neighborhood's growing problems, such as high infant mortality rates and serious residential overcrowding.