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Live United by Erin Haag

We have a few volunteers who take the time to help us handle the phone calls. They’re incredibly valuable to us, ensuring that we log all the messages, connect with people needing appointments and calling our attention to something more significant. When we make over 500 appointments a month, that’s a lot of time spent tracking the appointments, making phone calls, playing phone tag back and forth. One volunteer brought my attention to a phone call. She told me, “It’s the saddest message ever.” A woman had called for an appointment for shopping at the food pantry.

She also asked about any resources for getting a suit for her husband. You see, her husband is expected to pass away soon, and she wants to bury him in a suit. While the message is heartbreaking, there’s a bigger picture that I look at here.

This is a perfect example of why the food pantry is so important. Twice a month, this senior comes to shop for herself and her husband. They’re in their 80s and live independently in one of our smaller communities. She’s been known to deliberate over which vegetables she can trick her husband into eating, and tells me how she’s going to hide the unexpected ice cream bar inside a different container so she doesn’t have to share. She wound up having to cancel her appointment because she experienced a health issue this week, and her mobility is impacted. We chatted for a while, and I learned of a few other issues she’s having. I asked her permission to connect her with some resources, such as SEMCAC’s meal delivery or the CFSP commodity box. While there’s no formal program that I’m aware of for providing suits, we’re asking around to see what we can figure out for that. We’ve asked about the suit size and we’re looking for something that would be a 2X.

With the food pantry, shoppers learn about other programs. Shoppers build relationships with our volunteers, our staff and our organization in general. They learn that United Way is a name they can turn to, and that while we can’t help with every single thing, we’re happy to brainstorm and to think outside the box for something. As a local, community-based organization, I have the power to write about the stories, to connect donors and organizations that want to give back to our community. There’s been some beautiful stories over the years, and I have no doubt that this will wind up being another one. I don’t know how it’s going to happen yet, but when I tell the stories, our community shows up in unexpected ways.

Last week, the board of directors met to finalize and approve the recommendations for funding from the Community Investment Committee for the 2024 Community Impact Grants. Next week, I’ll share the specific organizations, but I figure that I probably should tell them and give them a chance to share with their own boards before I announce it in the paper. It was a challenging year for the committee as we had more applications than anticipated. I’ll say this though — this was a fantastic committee comprised of returning members of the community, new community members getting involved for the first time and representation from our board of directors. A board member remarked at our meeting that she read through the CIC notes, and she thought they were very thorough and could tell that they took the time to dig into the details.

We have two more board meetings this year. While we’re neck deep, or maybe even over our heads with our end of year programming with the Welcome Pantry, Winter Gear Drive and Jingle, we’re also looking to the future. United Way Worldwide has rolled out new impact areas. Where traditionally, United Way has been known for the three pillars of health, education and income, those impact areas are changing. It’s not that we’re changing specifically those areas, but rather that they’re expanded and articulated in a different way to really provide a call to action. The job of the board of directors will be to determine how our local United Way is going to address challenges within those new impact areas, and our local strategy for those areas.

Instead of health, education and income, the new impact areas are youth opportunities, financial security, community resiliency and healthy communities.

I think you’ll see that it’s not drastically different, but it’s going to allow us to define a little more what exactly our priorities are — not only at the board level but at the community level. While United Way Worldwide has done this work and provided guidelines, United Way of Freeborn County is still locally run, locally funded and invests locally — in your neighbors, your employees, your businesses and your organizations. Each of these categories are going to bring questions to our board, to our community. We’re going to be challenged to dig deeper into the details and look beyond just “youth” and what exactly it is that youth need.

I used one such example in a presentation last week. When we talk about programs that focus on children, what do we as a community want to focus on? Do we want to focus on child care, ensuring safe and healthy places for children to go while their parents work? This is more of an economic issue, ensuring that our businesses have a workforce, that families can afford child care and the opportunity to earn a living wage. Or do we want to focus on the education piece of early childhood, which is more about funding early learning programs. Or maybe we want to focus on the education piece of providing summer learning opportunities, ensuring the summer slide doesn’t happen, or providing tutoring for students falling behind. There are also opportunities for things such as the YMCA’s Teen Center, providing a safe place for teenagers to come and socialize, receiving food and having a place to do homework. Is this education? Or is it more about getting kids into a safe place, reducing potential underage drinking and/or drug use? It’s not black and white. It’s not clearly one category or another either — because sometimes early learning programs provide wrap-around child care, ensuring both that children can receive quality education and safe child care while their parents are working.

One thing about my job is that I’m always hopeful for the future. Recently, I spoke with a service club member that shared that their new priorities were aligning with some of ours. We got to talking about literacy, and how our two organizations could potentially collaborate. I love this stuff! This is what being united is all about — bringing organizations together, bringing people together to accomplish what no one organization can accomplish on their own. I look forward to seeing the beautiful stories of the 2024 holiday giving season and seeing what the possibilities of 2025 will be. If you’d like to join us by volunteering, donating, adopting a Jingle family or even just brainstorming, give us a call. If you have any ideas of a suit, give me a call about that too. You can reach us at 507-373-8670.

Erin Haag is the executive director of the United Way of Freeborn County.