Did you know that the average annual cost of high quality early childhood care is nearly $10,000? Imagine a family that is already struggling to make ends meet faced with an additional expense of $9,734, the average cost of high quality childcare in Austin according to the Texas Workforce Board. Even for a family with two adults working full time at minimum wage, that’s a third of the family’s income for the year going to childcare instead of housing, food, utilities or other necessary expenses. Because of this high cost and the barrier it represents to students starting kindergarten, United Way for Greater Austin supports childcare centers serving low-income families with free or reduced tuition through the Success By 6 Center Project. The initiative currently works with 13 childcare centers, serving over 1,000 children in Austin. The Center Project works with these centers to help them meet state and national standards for quality early childhood education including training for teachers, leveraging in-kind and volunteer resources to improve facilities and providing data collection and analysis to improve individual outcomes for students. On Aug. 19, employees from all seven Kerbey Lane Café (KLC) locations joined Hands On Central Texas (HOCT) to beautify Open Door Preschool East – one of the longest running partner schools of the Center Project. KLC volunteers painted four classrooms, over half of the rooms serving students. While the KLC volunteers were not expert painters, HOCT staff provided a short training and in-depth project coordination to ensure volunteers felt comfortable and completed […]
Read MorePartner 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, […]
Read MoreSamsung, BuildASign Nominated for Philanthropy Awards
Our corporate partner Samsung Austin Semiconductor was nominated for the “Outstanding Philanthropic Large Organization” award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) this year. The company will be honored for this achievement at the Philanthropy Day awards ceremony on February 4th, 2016. Samsung Austin Semiconductor’s General Counsel and Senior Director of Public Affairs, Catherine Morse, who also serves as UWATX Board Chair, spoke to us about the accomplishment and how Samsung’s long-term investment in UWATX played a large part in the company being recognized for this award. “We feel good about this award because we have a focused philanthropic effort on early childhood education, youth development, STEM education and environmental sustainability,” Morse said. “By far, our largest partner for the past five years has been United Way.” Samsung was nominated for this award by UWATX, Open Door Preschools and Breakthrough Austin. In 2010, Samsung Austin Semiconductor made a $1 million donation to our Success By 6 program. Since then, more than 200 families have benefitted from the program and numerous high-quality preschool programs have been opened as a result. “As a community investor, we really want to focus on evidence based-programming and that’s what sets United Way apart from other nonprofits. UWATX is a good steward of Samsung’s dollars because they measure outcomes of programs and hold other nonprofits accountable for the work they do. It doesn’t make much sense to invest in things that just ‘feel good,’ but things that work and result in better outcomes for the community. […]
Read MoreSavings Program Pilot Shows Positive Results
Did you know that one-third of Austin residents are classified as low-income? United Way for Greater Austin’s Financial Stability program helps those who are struggling get the guidance they need through three targeted core strategies: learning, saving and thriving. We recognize that in order to create community-wide changes, individuals and families struggling to become financially stable need the help and support of agencies, social workers and volunteers. The national Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) supports UWATX’s Financial Stability program and sought to develop a workplace-based savings program for low-wage employees. The savings program helps them save a portion of their paychecks through direct deposit through their employer. UWATX partnered with Open Door Preschools to implement a pilot of this workplace-based savings program and then worked with consultants from OpportunityTexas and Raise Texas to help evaluate the program. The goals of the pilot program were to get employees to sign up for a savings account if they did not have one and to also sign up for direct deposit. Although the savings program is still ongoing at Open Door Preschools, the pilot phase was eight weeks long and had three components aimed to decrease barriers to signing up: 1) Employees were prepared – Employees initially learned about the savings program through an email from their executive director. The email included information on what the employees needed to bring to prepare for the meeting. 2) Employees attended a facilitated meeting – Through a facilitated kickoff meeting at each preschool location, the executive director gave employees an opportunity […]
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