United Way of York County

United Way of York County's strategic plan 2014-2020 is focused on ensuring:
*All children, birth to age 5, and their families have the best start with quality child care, strong early literacy supports and elementary school attendance (BRIGHT BEGINNINGS)
*Youth are engaged in their community and philanthropy through service and leadership development (CONNECTED YOUTH); and
*SUPPORTIVE SERVICES that meet the basic needs of many and that build the capacity of nonprofits through targeted investments, including ensuring children and seniors have access to nutritious HEALTHY FOODS to maintain their well being.

Our strategies include investing in community services and targeted initiatives, participating in community coalitions and collaboratives that address our priorities and developing our own projects that further progress on those priorities.

For example, to address our Bright Beginnings priorities, we provide investments to quality early child care programs (approx. $100,000 in 2015). Our Volunteer Reader Project is one strategy to improve early literacy outcomes and our annual Tools4Schools drive and distribution ensures 1000+ children have the supplies they need to start and stay in school.

United Way of York County works to meets its goals through local fundraising, securing sponsors and grants for special projects, partnering with other organizations and community leaders, and mobilizing the power of volunteers to address needs.

We are convenors and collaborative leaders in our community and regularly provide facilitation, meeting and initiative support. As an example, for four years, we served as the fiscal agent, financial manager and 'backbone' for a countywide hunger initiative. Currently, we are supporting an initiative called UNITE, a coalition that is targeting teen mental healthy needs in York County.

Since 1991, UWYC has had a volunteer center focused on recruiting volunteers, building the capacity of nonprofits to do so and providing best practice training for volunteer managers and nonprofit leaders. Since 2015, we have been nationally recognized as a Service Enterprise by Points of Light for our efforts to engage skilled volunteers in the mission related work of our organization.

We are seeing measurable results - improved reading proficiency - for the children supported via our Volunteer Reader Project. Our goal is to have a VRP site in each of the 11 school districts in our county by 2021.

Our efforts to involve more youth in their community through service are on the rise. To support youth engagement, more than 1500 high school and college students have learned about volunteering and participated in service activities this year. This is a 42% increase over last year. Again, we hope to have a Youth Day of Caring in each of the county's middle schools by the end of 2021.

We know that for every dollar contributed to our United Way, we can return the value of $4.94 back to the community. We know this by tracking our results in mobilizing volunteers, investing in high quality direct service programs, securing grants and other resources for our work, providing supports that save local residents money on prescriptions, supporting the building of nonprofit capacity and more.