Who We Are
Who We Are
Everyone deserves a chance to build a good life. At the simplest level, people must be healthy in order to learn; people at all ages must have opportunities to learn in order to prepare to sustain themselves and their families; and, people must have pathways for earning a decent living and building financial sustainability for their families.
California's United Ways
This is why, throughout California, across the United States and increasingly internationally (in Asia and Eastern Europe), United Ways advance opportunities for low and moderate income people to lead successful lives by focusing on three priority areas:
- Health
- Education
- Financial Sustainability
California’s independent local United Ways collectively raise over 200 million dollars a year in charitable gifts for targeted investments, critical health, education, and human services in our communities. Individually and together, California’s United Ways build a stronger California by mobilizing our communities' public, private and non-profit sectors through research, civic engagement, public policy advocacy, and results-based funding.
Our Mission
United Ways of California improves health, education and financial results for low income children and families by enhancing and coordinating the advocacy and community impact work of California’s 37 United Ways.
We do this by:
- Engaging the public for the common good: Advancing the health, education and financial sustainability goals of California United Ways through education and policy advocacy
- Boosting program impact: Enhancing the community impact of California United Ways by sharing innovations and lessons learned, improving practices and building organizational capacity
- Resource development: Helping bring funding and resources to the communities United Ways serve through regional and statewide collaboratives, and working with donors wishing to support United Ways at a regional and state level
What Success Will Look Like
If we could wave a magic wand, we would create a California in which all low income parents would have the resources and capabilities they need to keep their children healthy, to give them access to the education they need to develop knowledge, wisdom and the skills they’ll need to sustain themselves and their families. All children and families would have the capability to chart their own course in life, to pursue the paths they choose. This autonomy is the heart of the California Dream, the American Dream.
In the near term, we will measure our progress by how many of California’s children have health coverage, how many low income children and families have access to free, professional information and referral services to connect them to resources, how many low income families increase their financial resources and acumen (evidenced by indicators such as, for example, improvements in Self-Sufficiency Standard benchmarks and credit scores, and income accessed through the Earned Income Tax Credit program). Over the longer term, if we are successful, California’s low income children will be healthier (evidenced by indicators such as declines in diabetes or obesity), better positioned to achieve their learning potential (increased school readiness, increased graduation rates), and live in households with greater earning power and stability.
How We Engage the Public for the Common Good
In our civic engagement, education and advocacy work, we see our role as bringing unusual and seemingly incompatible groupings of stakeholders together to solve problems. We are a nonpartisan organization, and we believe strongly that the involvement of all sectors – business, nonprofits, philanthropy, government, and interested citizens – is required to make progress on vital challenges affecting the health, education and financial stability prospects of low income children and families. Our approach is to work closely with local United Ways to help them involve their board members, volunteers and supporters in these important causes.
How United Ways of California Works with Local United Ways
California’s local United Ways created United Ways of California to help advance all of our goals for California as a whole and push for system-wide improvements.
Local United Ways do vital work in their counties or sub-regions. Even the most powerful of them, however, can be more effective by working in partnership with others. By working together to take a statewide view, we seek to pursue opportunities and develop resources across multiple regions and/or the entire state, and to influence the state policy environment that has such an impact on local United Ways’ chances of success in their communities.