Author: Ricky Deakyne

Volunteer Spotlight: Peggy Wilson, Texas Mutual Insurance Company

It’s that time of year again. The heat. Buying school clothes; buying school supplies. Preparing for the school year gets expensive quick. To prepare students (and parents) for the 2016-17 school year, volunteers from all over Austin came together at Webb Early College Prep Academy on Aug. 18 to assemble school supply kits, reorganize the school library, aid teachers in preparing their classrooms and landscape the flower beds around campus. One of the sponsors of our Aug. 18 Back to School Readiness Event at Webb was Texas Mutual Insurance Company. Texas Mutual has a very large and active volunteer base, one of which is their IT Senior Manager, Peggy Wilson. Peggy has been volunteering with UWATX for just over a year and she loves it. She explains, “The reactions to volunteering at UWATX are very positive – we love it.” Read our brief Q and A below to get to know Peggy and her experiences volunteering at UWATX. 1. What inspires you to volunteer? People say volunteering is unselfish, but I actually think it feels good to help others. In a way, it’s self-serving, as corny as it sounds. You get away from your own problems for a while when you focus on others. It’s also nice to learn about other people – whether they’re those you’re helping or those you’re working with. 2. What do you like to do in your spare time? I’m pretty simple – I like to spend time with my husband, Chris and my dog, Otis. […]

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Partner Spotlight: Any Baby Can

Photo: Any Baby Can United Way for Greater Austin believes collaboration is essential to tackling our community’s largest problems. We work with many nonprofit, public and private organizations in our community to have a larger impact and create real change in our city. One of these funded partners is Any Baby Can. Any Baby Can is a nonprofit organization that believes “all children deserve the chance to be healthy and happy”—a vision in line with UWATX’s own. Any Baby Can serves children with developmental delays, chronic or life-threatening illnesses and hearing loss, as well as their families. Any Baby Can also serves first-time pregnant women, including teenage moms, moms with postpartum depression and parents seeking parenting skills. According to Any Baby Can’s website, 34,959 children in Travis County have a special health care need. Services Any Baby Can offers to their clients include in-home physical, occupational and speech therapy, case management, mental health counseling for anyone in the family, support groups and nurse-home visitation. They also partner with Open Door Preschool so that parents receiving onsite classes have quality childcare while they are learning new parenting skills. Any Baby Can hosts monthly organization tours open to anyone interested in learning more about the organization. While on the tour, the absence of workers in many of the offices is striking. This is because much of Any Baby Can’s therapy and case work is done in the homes of their clients. Any Baby Can has boasts many robust programs. One such program, […]

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CommunityTHRIVE Offers Spanish Courses

Just a few months ago, United Way for Greater Austin announced the launch of a new initiative within our Financial Stability work called CommunityTHRIVE. CommunityTHRIVE provides financial education classes, coaching and community resources in partnership with the City of Austin Neighborhood Centers and Goodwill. Paola Silvestre-Leveck is Goodwill’s new financial literacy trainer for the CommunityTHRIVE program at the Rosewood-Zaragosa Neighborhood Center. Thanks to Paola and continued collaboration between UWATX and Goodwill, we are excited to now be able to offer these important classes to Spanish speakers in addition to the already existing English classes. Paola earned her Business Administration degree and previously worked in investment for several years. Before her time at Goodwill, she worked as a legal assistant and business plan consultant for an immigration law firm in Austin. She has worked at Goodwill for three months and has already taught roughly 40 financial classes. Each week at various Goodwill locations, she teaches eight classes and in addition, she works with UWATX to provide three classes for the CommunityTHRIVE program and two for the City of Austin. “People usually have a lot of misconceptions regarding credit reports and credit scores, so majority of the questions surround those two topics,” Paola said. “The challenges are to not only convey financial information, but ensure that the topics are not confusing and that the client does not feel bored throughout the training.” The CommunityTHRIVE classes cover budgeting, savings, credit and financial recovery. In addition, Paola created specific modules that fulfill specific client […]

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Ask An ECL

United Way for Greater Austin’s 2016 campaign season is just beginning, and we’re excited to work with more than 200 companies with nearly 700 locations in the Greater Austin area to raise money to invest back into our community. We could not raise as much money as we do annually without the help of some very important volunteers: UWATX Employee Campaign Leaders (ECLs). ECLs are representatives from our corporate partners that lead their company’s employee giving campaign. They host fun events to teach their coworkers about our programs, set up time for our development officers to stop by and speak about UWATX, and inspire their coworkers to give through each paycheck and set fundraising goals. Two of our seasoned ECLs, Melanie Zamora of Texas Gas Service and Kim Perry-Klotz of KPMG, share their experiences in this crucial role. Where do you work and how long have you served as an ECL? How did you become the ECL for your company? Kim: “I work for KPMG, LLP in Austin, Texas. I was asked to be the Involve Coordinator for our office three years ago and gladly accepted. As the Involve Coordinator, one of my roles is to organize and lead the Giving Campaign for our office each year.” Melanie: “I work for Texas Gas Service. I have been an ECL for two years. I was nominated to be an ECL after being with the company for an only a short period of time and gratefully accepted the challenge.” What did you like […]

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Two-Gen Programs Aim to Break Cycle of Poverty

At United Way for Greater Austin, we focus on wrapping our arms around entire families and fighting the root causes of poverty. A family living in poverty rarely struggles with only one factor causing their situation, and therefore cannot rise out of poverty by only receiving one type of aid or only one person in the family receiving help. As an example, let’s say Diane is a single mom of three children. Diane is working fulltime making minimum wage during the day and also has a side job at night to make extra money. She must pay for childcare for her youngest child during the weekdays, and is having trouble making ends meet to pay the rent, put food on the table and clothing on her children’s backs. She has no opportunity for promotion at work as she only speaks Spanish and only has her GED. As a result, she is also struggling with depression and feels she has no support. Her oldest child watches the other two after school, and he is struggling with grades and never has time or help with his homework because of this. If Diane receives one service, such as food stamps, this will help her put food on the table—but the fact remains that the family is still unable to be lifted out of poverty due to the variety of other factors affecting them. This is where two-generation, or “two-gen,” programs come into play. Many programs focus solely on low-income children or low-income adults, […]

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Spring Play To Learn Classes Graduate

As our Play To Learn program runs on a school year schedule, we just wrapped up our spring semester and are launching our summer groups with about 30 families participating. This year so far, a total of 204 families graduated from Play To Learn or an extension class through YMCA, which is a combination of Play To Learn and YMCA’s Early Learning Readiness program. Through Play To Learn, not only did young children leave with new skills but parents learned how to foster their child’s optimal development at home. Parents and children attended classes together with the following themes: • Social skills • Gross motor skills • Fine motor skills • Language Development • Emotional regulation skills • Geometry • Numeracy • Emerging Literacy “Honestly, this program did help my daughter a lot. My children are naturally very shy and now my daughter is less introverted and more social. I really did see a huge change in my daughter and I highly recommend the class. The reason I never missed a class is because I could tell my daughter loved being there and benefited greatly.” –Maria R. Attendees also learned digital literacy skills by practicing various tasks and using the pre-loaded educational apps on the Samsung tablets provided by United Way for Greater Austin. It is important to bridge the “digital divide” between low-income families and their more affluent peers now more than ever. Internet access is no longer a luxury but a necessity for individuals to complete homework, fill […]

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Guest Post: “Aspiring to Lead. Committed to Give Back.”

Heather Brunner has served on the UWATX Board of Directors for seven years, and as a volunteer for seventeen years. As she wraps up her final year on our board, she reflects on her time with United Way. “During my school years and at college, I was always a very active community volunteer. After college as a young professional, I was a road warrior, working long hours and was relentlessly focused on building my career–but something was missing. I wasn’t giving back to the welcoming Austin community that gave me such incredible career opportunity. In the summer of 1999, I saw an ad in the Austin American-Statesman with a call for volunteers from the United Way. I was familiar with United Way from employee giving campaigns at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and from Donna Van Fleet, a United Way board member and Business Unit Executive at IBM that I admired. So I decided to answer the call. Today, seventeen years later as I end my final Board of Directors term, I can say that serving United Way for Greater Austin has been one of the highest privileges and proudest accomplishments of my life. In those seventeen years, I’ve seen the organization change dramatically from a mostly fundraising “pass through” mechanism to local nonprofits, to a strategic catalyst and thought leader driving positive change for the working poor and their families. Twenty-five percent of our Greater Austin community is living on the edge of poverty and in need of a helping hand […]

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UWATX Partners with Colin’s Hope to Promote Water Safety

Colin’s Hope is an organization that educates families and children about water safety in efforts to prevent children from drowning. This work is especially important during summer, when pools and water parks are filled with kids. United Way for Greater Austin partnered with Colin’s Hope to distribute water safety cards to more than 3,200 families. Laura Olson of UWATX’s Success By 6 program also connected Colin’s Hope with early childhood organizations that primarily serve families with children under the age of 5 to expand the reach of the messaging. In addition to distributing water safety cards, United Way for Greater Austin provided support by: Identifying partners that could distribute the Colin’s Hope Water Safety Quiz to families with young children Connecting Colin’s Hope to partners that would assist in sharing water safety awareness information, including Child’s Inc., KLRU, the Literacy Coalition and the AISD Early Childhood program Offered to recruit volunteers to aid in distribution of water safety cards via Hands On Central Texas Will assist in any future Spanish translations of Colin’s Hope material Developing a next level of outreach and education for summer camp providers/staff in low-income communities Will create a 2017 outreach plan with Colin’s Hope to educate even more families next year We are proud to partner with Colin’s Hope to keep Austin’s children safe this summer!

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Atlassian In-Kind Donations Boost UWATX Efficiency

Giving back to a nonprofit doesn’t always mean donating money or volunteering. We are grateful to the many companies who offer us in-kind product or service donations that help us run smoother internally, put on events or simply function better day-to-day. For the past couple of years, Atlassian has greatly supported United Way for Greater Austin in a very behind-the-scenes way in addition to volunteer projects, such as sponsoring a family during the holidays. Atlassian is a team collaboration software company that helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Last year, Atlassian donated one of its products, Hipchat, to the UWATX office. Hipchat is a team chat service that allows our staff to share files, ask quick questions, video chat when we are working outside the office and—do not underestimate the importance of this—share gifs with each other. This was a HUGE upgrade for our staff, who formerly relied on either emails or poking our heads into each others offices to ask questions. Since the implementation of Hipchat, it has been much easier for UWATX staff to communicate quickly without interrupting each other and spend our time more productively. This year, Atlassian gave us an even bigger gift: Confluence. Confluence is an amazing team content and collaboration platform that provides an intranet for United Way for Greater Austin. We now have all of the information an employee could possibly want to know about UWATX all in one place. It helps us better manage projects, allows others to see what […]

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Summer Learning Activities for Preschool-Aged Children

Wondering what to do with your young child at home all summer? We’ve compiled a list of fun AND educational activities you can do for free or very cheaply with your toddler or preschool-aged child this summer that will improve their math, reading and motor skills. Visit a farmer’s market The plethora of fruits and vegetables at markets are great learning tools. Children can learn colors and work on math skills by counting the fruit they help you pick out. Find a farmer’s market near you. Open a lemonade stand Make lemonade with your child and let them help you measure and count the ingredients. Help them count the money they receive from customers. Bonus points if you teach them about the importance of giving back by donating their profits to a local charity! Go on a nature walk Create an adventure in your backyard, neighborhood park or the greenbelt. Point out the different kinds of trees, plant and insect life you find with your child. Put on a puppet show This project will spark creativity. Read an age-appropriate book with your child. Then, using paper lunch bags, pipe cleaners, markers and other craft items, create puppets of the main characters and act out the story you just read together. At-home Olympics To get your child excited about the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil, host a competition of your own. Count together to see how many times your child can jump over a jumprope or make a rotation with a […]

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