Community Impact

Community Impact is defined as “Improving lives by mobilizing communities to create lasting changes in community conditions.” One of the goals of Community Impact is to enhance and develop programs that align with the target outcomes of each Impact Area.

No single program can meet all the needs of its clients. With that in mind, your United Way of Greater Lafayette supports a network of care by investing in more than 70 programs each year. This network of care includes programs that offer day care, after school care, life skills training, employment training, health care services, and a variety of emergency services. Community Impact oversight helps ensure that these programs are improving lives in the most effective way possible.

Improving Lives

United Way has expanded its strategic approach to improving lives. We continue to fund programs and services that help people in need now (intervention) and build skills in children, youth and adults to help them avoid needing assistance in the future (prevention). Now, we are also looking upstream to address the underlying issues/root causes that create obstacles to success for some in our community. The graphic below shows the Community Investment Triangle on which our new strategic approach to improving lives is based:

We focused our efforts based on five factors: our 2006 Community Needs Assessment, third party statistical data on health and human issues, information on programs and services already available in our community, national benchmarks with other United Way efforts and heritage. In the fall of 2007, the Board endorsed five target outcomes:

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children entering school ready to succeed*

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youths graduating from high school *

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children and families being safe in their homes and our community

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individuals and families avoiding financial crises*

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individuals and families adopting healthy lifestyles*

*Our target populations in four of these efforts are low income folks (i.e. a family of four earning less than $42,000 annually), many of whom already rely on United Way agencies for support. However, we believe that our work on the root causes preventing these people from achieving the desired goals will positively impact people with higher incomes and the entire community.

Bringing It All Together

Through our Community Investment Process we seek to fund agencies that can be trusted to handle funds appropriately, deliver positive outcomes for their clients, and align with our community level target outcomes. In addition to this funding process, we seek to align all of our work towards improving lives according to our target outcomes.