On April 8, Ruthless Good: The Great Austin Scavenger Hunt will dispatch dozens of teams from the Long Center to crack clues, solve trivia challenges, and discover photo-worthy landmarks and locales. But the rolicking hunt’s true aim is problem solving on a much grander scale–bolstering equitable community-wide access to health, education and work. I’m serving as honorary chair for the hunt, because I love the way this event shows that every Austinite can be a philanthropist and that giving is fun. Each one of us can leave the comfort of our homes, join a team, cultivate curiosity about our community, and give time or money (however limited) to support the causes we care about. And when we do it together we can have a huge collective impact. Those who join the hunt will raise awareness and funds for the United Way for Greater Austin, a powerful force for good. Each year, thousands of community members contribute to United Way through workplace campaigns and special events like Ruthless Good. United Way then pools those resources to make transformative investments in vital community programs. When you show up on April 8th or encourage others to do so, you help important initiatives that United Way funds, such as Success By 6, which launches Austin’s youngest citizens into bright futures. The early years are crucial for preparing children for school and life beyond, yet in Austin high-quality childcare often runs $10,000 or more per year, pricing out those who need it most. Success By […]
Read More2-Gen Network Focuses on Economic Mobility for Next Generation & Parents Too
Austin faces challenges in creating a community where all children and families have the opportunity to succeed. Social mobility in the U.S. is significantly lower than in most developed countries (about 8% compared to 11% in Denmark and 13% in Canada) (Corak, 2013) and in Austin we’re behind two-thirds of metro areas in the U.S in economic mobility. To extend opportunities to all kids regardless of zip code, we need to look at how we can help children and parents, together. That’s why United Way for Greater Austin (UWATX) and our partners are diving head first into cultivating 2-Gen programming in Austin. “2-Gen” refers to two generations. It’s a paradigm for the coordinated approach to services, policies and systems that addresses the needs of low-to-moderate income children and their parents. In Austin there are individual programs addressing parents’ economic opportunities from workforce to post-secondary education, children’s education and especially high quality early childhood education, and the wrap-around support to make the impact lasting, but few have put them together in an intentional, intensive, coordinated way, yet. We want to impact families of all kinds, but we know that families with young kids are uniquely poised to benefit from 2-Gen interventions. Research shows that increases in a parent’s education or income during the first few years of a child’s life have a powerful effect on a child’s development (Chase-Lansdale & Brooks-Gunn, 2014; Kaushal, 2014; Sommer et al., 2012). In addition, high quality early childhood education programs provide a safe, nurturing place […]
Read MoreVolunteer Spotlight: Cecily Gordon
Cecily Gordon volunteers with UWATX in many capacities and brings along a fantastic group of philanthropic and fun co-workers from eBay! Cecily is currently serving on our Logistics committee, planning the inaugural year of Ruthless Good: The Great Austin Scavenger Hunt. She brings tons of passion and great ideas to everything she touches and she personally coordinated a holiday meal kit drive at eBay in November to ensure that families at Webb Middle School would have access to a delicious Thanksgiving meal. From Family Volunteer Days to community clean-ups throughout Austin, eBay is a valued partner of UWATX and Cecily is leading the charge to make Austin Greater! Get to know more about Cecily and eBay’s volunteer engagement in our Q and A below. How long have you been involved with UWATX? I have had the pleasure of partnering with UWATX since early 2015. What kind of volunteer projects has eBay done? Being involved in the community is something eBay holds very dear. By partnering with UWATX, we have been able to provide our employees with opportunities to serve in a variety of ways over the past year, from community beautification projects, charity fun runs, working with the elderly & youth, family volunteer days & our Annual Thanksgiving Food Drive which supports the families of Webb Middle School. What reactions have you seen from fellow employees regarding eBay’s volunteer efforts? We have an exceptional group of people who work at our Austin Campus, service & charitable giving is ingrained in what we […]
Read MoreHundreds of volunteers joined UWATX at our annual MLK Day of Service
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. On January 14, 2017, hundreds of volunteers joined United Way for Greater Austin at our annual MLK Day of Service! This event is our way of celebrating the national Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday by empowering individuals, strengthening communities, and working together to create solutions that bring us closer to realizing Dr. King’s vision. UWATX partnered with Keep Austin Beautiful to organize a cleanup of MLK Blvd from I-35 to US 183. By coming together from throughout the community to beautify this area, volunteers were able to make this great neighborhood cleaner and safer for everyone to enjoy! Volunteers were welcomed by our guest speaker, Principal Moore, of nearby Lee Lewis Campbell Elementary; then they got to work collecting trash and items to be recycled along a four mile stretch of MLK Blvd in East Austin. We were very thankful to see volunteers from local Americorps programs, churches, families, and companies! During the cleanup event, UWATX partnered with local non-profits, including the Central Texas Food Bank and Creative Action, to provide volunteer opportunities in various locations throughout the Greater Austin community to celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Volunteers sorted and organized donations, worked in community gardens, and prepared educational supplies throughout Austin. UWATX partnered with Little Helping Hands to host a family-friendly volunteer fair where children and parents worked together to spread the love of volunteerism by completing projects that benefited Austin’s […]
Read MoreHB4 impact in Central Texas and how you can help advocate for quality Pre-K
As the 2017 Texas Legislature is about to begin, UWATX is focusing efforts on advocating on behalf of children and their families. Pre-K has been an important issue area during past legislative sessions, and is poised to be an important issue area during this session. During the 2015 legislative session, the 84th Texas Legislature passed House Bill 4 (HB4) as part of Governor Greg Abbotts’ emergency early education initiative. Over the last 6 months, United Way for Greater Austin (UWATX), in conjunction with Texans Care for Children and Texas Education Grantmakers Advocacy Consortium, has worked to better understand Central Texas school districts’ interest in and experience with the State’s new HB 4 High Quality Pre-K grant by looking into the level and scope of district demand, the application process, the opportunities HB 4 funds bring to local Pre-K quality improvement efforts, implementation challenges, and policy opportunities for the State to strengthen support for local Pre-K priorities. The bill aimed to implement high-quality education standards for Texas Pre-K students by establishing a grant funding program of $118 million for the 2016-2017 State fiscal biennium. Under the program, funds were awarded to eligible school districts and open-enrollment charter schools who applied and agreed to meet certain enhanced quality standards. These include: curriculum requirements based on updated Pre-K guidelines; implementation of a progress monitoring tool; additional teacher education requirements; the implementation of a family engagement plan to encourage and maintain family involvement; and working towards teacher-to-student ratios of 1-to-11. HB 4 also requires […]
Read More9 volunteers making Austin greater
As part of our 90-day celebration of UWATX’s 90th anniversary, we’re working on 10 lists of 9 highlighting influential and impactful people in the Austin community. In the seventh part of our series, we bring you nine volunteers changing Austin. Austin is known for our volunteering spirit – nearly 30 percent of Austinites invest their time in making our community even better. We’re proud to work with thousands of these dedicated community members through our Hands On Central Texas program, Austin’s largest volunteer network. Approximately 1 in every 17 volunteers in Austin interacts with our program, so we thought we’d take a second to highlight a few of these truly outstanding volunteers. 1. Ryan Melendez, BB&T Ryan not only teaches families about banking and managing money in English and in Spanish, but also builds confidence in our families by showing their impact on the economy. Ryan’s been a wonderful volunteer by teaching financial education and conducting outreach for UWATX’s Bank On Central Texas initiative. 2. Tom Wald, former Executive Director of Bike Austin Tom brought his cycling expertise to a group of Decker Middle School Volunteer Leaders who were passionate about securing a bike lane or sidewalk on the route to their campus. He helped the students understand safety laws and ultimately get in front of TXDOT to share their stories and letters of advocacy which helped to secure priority funding for a Decker sidewalk that will ensure a safe passage to and from school. 3. Jennifer Healy, Target Jennifer’s […]
Read MoreHands On Central Texas gets a makeover!
We strongly believe that donating your time is a valuable gift to our community – which is why we run Austin’s largest volunteer network. This week, we updated the Hands On Central Texas site to make it easier for volunteers to find what they’re looking for. Here’s what changed: New homepage We’ve updated the homepage with a more intuitive slideshow so you can easily browse the top events we have going on. We’ve also added a stream of photos from projects and created project categories. Project categories We’ve heard from you that the search function on the site is tricky – it doesn’t always pull the opportunities you’re really looking for. So we decided to take the guess work out of connecting to volunteering by making it easier to access opportunities in the areas we see most often. The categories – which are accessible from the home page and the new By Categories page – include opportunities related to our UWATX Strategic Programs (Success By 6, Target Graduation and Financial Opportunity) and those that offer team building, are family friendly or fit a seasonal need, like tax prep or holiday volunteering. Our goal is to connect you to meaningful volunteering – so let us know if you’re not seeing what you want to see. Easy-to-find calendar We often direct volunteers to our calendar to find the right opportunities for them – so we’ve made the calendar accessible from every page on the site. Now, you can easily see a calendar […]
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