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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."
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