Bergen County's United Way

Bergen County’s United Way helps people 24 hours a day whenever and wherever help is needed by providing concrete solutions to critical community problems – with tangible results directly impacting individuals and families throughout every municipality in the county.

Our strategies for making help happen include:
• 2-1-1, the United Way’s 24 hour statewide service answering every call or click for help – 24 hours a day. It is a system that is free and easy to use – think 9-1-1 emergencies, 2-1-1 everything else.

• The Compassion Fund, direct financial assistance to help when no one else can to insure that the most basic needs are there for people in crisis.

• Housing Works, helping neighbors build communities with the creation of new and affordable housing for working poor families and individuals with special needs.

Our strengths are the quality of our programs, the professionalism of our staff, the dedication of the members of our Board of Directors and our capacity to build strategic partnerships to advance our mission.

2-1-1 has successfully completed the first phase of national accreditation. Certification by the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (AIRS) is expected in March 2015.

BCUW/Madeline Housing Partners is designated as a Certified Housing Development Corporation (CHDO) by the New Jersey State Department of Community Affairs and recognized as a developer of choice by the New Jersey State Department of Developmental Disabilities.

Our free, confidential, and multi-lingual 2-1-1 service handles 200,000 calls for help each year. Our Compassion Fund provides temporary financial assistance to hundreds more, when no other source of help is available. Once the immediate crisis is stabilized, we connect families to services to help them rebuild. Our Back to Work program has put 220 long-term unemployed back into the job market.

Perhaps less familiar to most, is that BCUW, in partnership with the Madeline Corporation has been building award winning “Special Homes for Very Special People” to meet the need for independent living opportunities for individuals with developmental disabilities; a desperately needed alternative to costly out-of-state residential placements and unnecessary institutionalization.

Creative Housing Solutions for People with Special Needs
“Our son has lived in the Crescent Commons community in Allendale for nearly two years and they have been the most independent two years of his life thus far,” Liz Mulholland mother of JJ - age 27 (Paramus)

Today, in New Jersey, an estimated 50,000 adults are developmentally disabled. Nearly 8,000 of them are on a waiting list for supportive housing. Many live at home, often cared for by aging parents increasingly concerned about who will care for their adult children when they no longer can. Still others, live in institutional settings but could live independently and productively in community-based affordable housing were it available. Demand is growing exponentially as the first generation of children diagnosed with autism reach adulthood. Real but very scary, is that New Jersey has the highest rate of autism in the country.

To date, the BCUW/Madeline Partnership has completed 15 projects and has the opportunity, over the next several years, to build an additional 26 community-based affordable housing developments that will provide independent living opportunities for 291 adults with special needs – including Down syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Autism, Multiple Sclerosis and other intellectual disabilities. The tenants who reside in the housing we have built are living proof that with carefully tailored and individualized supports and services all people can grow and develop in housing they control, no matter how significant their disabilities.

BCUW has raised or secured funding totaling $27 million from a combination of sources including local, state and federal grants, foundations, and private philanthropy to underwrite the cost of the projects already built or under construction. Our collaborative strategy works, and we seek to maximize our growth pace through securing private support of $5.2 million over the next 5 years.