News Articles

United Way's Role Evolves as Needs Change

by Harvy Lipman
STAFF WRITER

The Record, Sunday, April 8, 2007- Time was when the United Way didn't give money to people like Christopher McSherry, at least not directly.

When he came home injured in December following a National Guard tour in Iraq, McSherry found himself in a desperate financial crisis. He needed several thousand dollars to pay his mortgage, and he simply didn't have the cash.
"The United Way stepped up pretty big," said McSherry, a Monmouth County resident. "They came up with a check for the mortgage, around $3,100."

Until a few years ago, Bergen County's United Way, which helped McSherry, operated on the traditional model of United Ways around the country: taking in donations and redistributing them to local charities, which would be the ones most likely to help someone like the wounded vet.

But the days of the United Way serving as nothing more than a funding conduit for other groups are fading into history. The Internet allows people to research charities and make their donations directly. Corporate donation programs, once the lifeblood of the United Way, are on the decline. And the cloud of a national scandal in the 1990s has discouraged other donors.
As a result, donations to United Ways over the past decade have failed even to keep pace with inflation.

"Donors had grown appropriately impatient with a system that did not appear to be solving problems," said Tom Toronto, president of Bergen County's United Way.

To survive, the nation's most familiar charitable institution has had to change. United Ways have established their own direct-support programs like the one that helped McSherry. And local branches now routinely allow donors to designate the charities they want their money given to.

That has slowed the loss of contributions, but it has come at a cost: fewer dollars available for United Ways to distribute to worthy local charities that aren't well-known. In fact, several North Jersey organizations that have long relied on the United Way for substantial support have been cut off altogether.
Officials at the United Way of America, the national umbrella organization in Alexandria, Va., have urged local branches to make the changes.

"We've been encouraging them to pick a small number of key-issue areas and direct their work into those," said Sheila Consaul, spokeswoman for the national organization.

Following the lead
The United Ways in Bergen and Passaic counties are among the converted. After discussions with county and community leaders, the Passaic County branch is focusing on early-childhood nutrition and child-abuse prevention. It developed projects in Passaic and Paterson, partnering with other local charities to run the programs and handling the financial management.

"We wanted it to be community-led and run, but the community organizations asked us to provide the administrative role," said Yvonne Zuidema, president of the United Way of Passaic County.

Toronto also pushed the Bergen County branch in the direction championed by the national organization. But before picking issues on which to focus, he had to find a way to figure out what the county's biggest needs are.

The answer came from 211, the 24-hour phone hot line Bergen County's United Way had established in 2005 to ease people's access to a range of human services. Toronto's staff began analyzing the calls from within the county.

"It gave insight into what are the most pressing things to address," he said.
Item One was short-term financial crisis: the person who couldn't afford to repair the car he needed for work; the woman with no health insurance who couldn't afford both her child's medicine and the rent. Relatively small amounts of aid would keep these people from unemployment or homelessness.

The result was the Compassion Fund, for which the Bergen County branch raised and spent $373,000 last year, and which it plans to expand to $1.1 million this year.

Surprise recipients
Among the hundreds of recipients was a group that took even the United Way by surprise: the families of National Guard soldiers deployed to Iraq.

"With many of our soldiers, their whole lives were interrupted," said Sgt. Minnie Hiller-Cousins, former family assistance coordinator with the 50th Main Support Battalion of the New Jersey National Guard, based in Teaneck.

"When one paycheck is removed from a home, it can be devastating."
In McSherry's case, the financial difficulties continued even after he came home.

"Once I left Iraq, I lost the combat pay and all the other special pay enhancements I was receiving while I was there," said McSherry, 37, of Atlantic Highlands.

He remains on active duty because his unit's deployment was extended, even though he's awaiting surgery and can't return to Iraq. Therefore, he can't go back to his job as a systems technician with Verizon or take any other civilian job. His current military pay is less than half what he earned at Verizon.

Desperate for help, McSherry told his superiors about his situation. They referred him to Bergen County's United Way, which paid the mortgage bill under a special effort targeting needy military families.

"That got us by," McSherry said.

A second area of need is affordable housing for the working poor, Toronto said.

"Much of the financial distress we were seeing was caused by the fact that these people are paying 60 percent or more of their income for housing," he said. "If we could help them buy a home, they would have an anchor in society. They'd be able to build up an asset, have some stability in their lives."
So the United Way has teamed up with Habitat for Humanity and other charities to build housing.

More than 300 people picked up applications for nine condominiums the group is building in Cliffside Park, said Lillian Ciufo, executive director of the Madeline Corp. of Palisades Park, one of the United Way's partner charities.

Worrisome shift
Those programs fill a huge void, said Harriet Tanner, executive director of the Community Chest of Englewood. But, she added, the United Way's shift in emphasis is a concern to some non-profits, which have seen their funding drop dramatically.

Toronto said the amount of money the United Way distributes to other charities was unchanged from 2005 to 2006, remaining around $6.5 million. But because an increasing amount of donors' dollars is being designated for specific organizations, less is available for the organization to distribute on a discretionary basis.

The result is that some local groups have been cut off. A few years ago, the Visiting Homemaker Service of Bergen County in Hackensack received $125,000 from the United Way. This year, it's getting no funds. The Women's Rights Information Center in Englewood also has lost its funding. The Bergen Family Center, with offices in Hackensack and Englewood, got $191,000 in 2003. By last year, that was down to $25,000.

"The impact of that cut is worse because it is in combination with dwindling government grants," said Joan Grzenda, executive director of the Women's Rights Information Center, which provides job training, housing and other services for low-income women.

She added that the loss of United Way funds also hurts her group's ability to raise money from individuals. "It meant something to people thinking about making a donation," she said, "that we were supported by such a traditional, well-known organization."