At United Way for Greater Austin, we run more than 200 employee campaigns in nearly 700 locations in the Austin area. Employee campaigns provide an opportunity for businesses to empower employees to be philanthropists by donating a portion of each paycheck back to the community. Last night, we celebrated and recognized companies who excelled in building philanthropy in our community at our 2015 Employee Campaign Awards. Award winners: Best Practices: Superior Health and Texas Gas This award recognizes the company that implements UWATX’s best campaign practices, which include Senior Officer involvement, access to employees and use of UWATX campaign materials among several others. This year we had two winners for this award. Superior Health kept their campaign at one week to give a sense of urgency; they also planned a week of fun, educational experiences for their employees encouraging them to give. Texas Gas established multiple opportunities for UWATX staff to come and speak to their employees about our work, as well as ran a closed campaign where employee donations were matched 1:1 by their foundation. Community Investment Award: H-E-B The Community Investment Award represents a company or companies who exemplify what it really means to wrap arms around a community to make a significant impact. Anyone who shops at H-E-B realizes it’s not your normal grocery store. This year, H-E-B decided to increase corporate giving to match the generosity of their employees and UWATX experienced a 150% increase in corporate giving. They make philanthropy a part of their culture and host […]
Read MoreGentrification and Gender: How Austin’s Changing Neighborhoods Affect Women and Children
Austin Community Foundation and United Way for Greater Austin co-hosted a panel on May 12th, “Gentrification & Gender: How Austin’s Changing Neighborhoods Affect Women and Children.” The panel was put on for both organizations’ women’s groups, UWATX’s Women’s Leadership Council and ACF’s Women’s Fund of Central Texas. Panel speakers were Dr. Eric Tang and Dr. Victor Sáenz of the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Tang is an assistant professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at UT. His research revealed that Austin was the only major growing city in the United States to experience an absolute numerical decline in African Americans. Dr. Tang is currently working on a book, East Avenue: African Americans in Austin’s Terrain of Inequality. Dr. Sáenz is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the educational success of boys and young men of color. Dr. Sáenz has developed a successful mentoring program for Latino boys in Austin ISD schools and created a statewide consortium to share best practices. He sees the educational success of boys as key to creating healthy families and communities. The panel started with a video from an Austin-American Statesman project on economic mobility in Austin. The video does a great job of describing how the history of segregation in Austin has led us to the current state of East Austin today. Dr. Tang elaborated on some troubling statistics from the most recent censuses in Austin. Austin is the only major city in the […]
Read MoreVolunteer Spotlight: Rina Patel
Rina Patel was first introduced to the United Way of Greater Austin more than 10 years ago through her position as the Wells Fargo area president for Mid-Central Texas. Upon moving to Austin in 2013, UWATX VP of Mission Advancement Dr. Leah Meunier, who then was in charge of managing our Women’s Leadership Council (WLC), met with Rina to introduce her to the giving society. “I have remained a WLC member because I am passionate about helping our youth—particularly through early childhood education— and ensuring they are set up for success,” said Patel. “The program also offers the opportunity for motivated, passionate, community-minded women to network and collaborate for a great cause. In particular, I’ve enjoyed the WLC meetings because the team always comes up with creative ways to educate everyone about important topics that need to be addressed in Austin.” Rina is also a dedicated volunteer and appreciates that Wells Fargo is invested in giving back to our community as a corporation as well. She finds that volunteering with her team members by sharing the expertise they already have is one of the best ways to give back. Wells Fargo’s Austin team has an impressive volunteer track record. More than 495 Wells Fargo Austin team members have volunteered more than 11, 500 hours and supported 695 nonprofit organizations through these projects. This includes 100 team members serving on local nonprofit boards, building three homes for families in need over 13 days and raising more than $325,000 last year to […]
Read MoreDonor Champions United Way After Receiving Years of Support
Lisa Suarez is the campaign leader for UPS, as well as a leadership giver and Women’s Leadership Council member. While every donor has a different reason driving them to give, Lisa’s longstanding relationship with United Way has transformed over time uniquely, as she started as a services recipient before turning into a donor. Lisa grew up in a low-income family that moved frequently due to the financial hardships they were faced with. “It really is a vicious cycle. I was never encouraged to go to college even though I was a straight ‘A’ student. That’s just not the priority in low-income neighborhoods…just living day to day is the priority, so most people don’t have the means or even the knowledge to encourage their kids to try to do more and break the cycle. As your grow up, you do what you are familiar with and begin to look for jobs that just get you by. You do what you’ve grown up seeing from your parents–the minimum–because that’s all they knew too.” “My life would have been completely different without United Way. It’s afforded me a life that I didn’t come from and didn’t think was possible for me, and I looked back and realized United Way got me where I am today. I haven’t reached all of my goals in life yet, but now I know that I’m capable of doing it–and I didn’t know that before.” –Lisa Suarez “People think those in need aren’t trying for themselves. When you […]
Read MoreFall Day of Caring 2015
Our annual Fall Day of Caring took place last week on September 11th, in conjunction with the National Day of Service and Remembrance. We could not think of a better way to remember this day than by giving back to our community, and neither could the hundreds of volunteers who joined us. This year, volunteers gave back what equates to more than $80,000 worth of work in just one day! More than 1,000 volunteers spent the day giving back at 40 projects across the city, including gardening projects, clean ups, assembling materials for our programs and sprucing up afterschool and Pre-K sites. Many of the volunteers came from our corporate partners, who utilized the day to not only give back but as a great opportunity for team-building. Team members from GM and UPS assembled materials for our Play To Learn program and loaded tablets for low-income families with educational apps and parent resources. Austin Coca-Cola assisted our funded partner BookSpring with sorting books. Rockwell Automation, PBK Architects, Aspen Heights, Build-a-Sign and Liquidation Channel teamed up to prep Creative Action for their variety of youth programs. Freescale employees worked on a variety of projects at Girlstart, the Empty Bowl Project and the Capital Area Food Bank. Farmers Insurance worked at Blackland Community Development Corporation. UWATX’s Women’s Leadership Council, a group of our most invested women donors dedicated to our early childhood education work, spent the day at El Buen Pastor organizing the resource room. JE Dunn and Advisory Board Company worked on improving the playground […]
Read MoreJuly’s Face 2 Face Recap with Ingrid Vanderveldt
July’s Face 2 Face speaker series, sponsored by the Austin Business Journal and Whole Foods, hosted Ingrid Vanderveldt. Vanderveldt is the founder of Empowering a Billion Women by 2020. EBW2020 is made up of three of Vanderveldt’s organizations: EBW2020, Ingrid Vanderveldt LLC and the EBW Foundation. The EBW Foundation was launched with a mentor-matching program during SXSW this past March. EBW aims to do just that–empower a billion women by 2020 by providing education, mentoring and policy programs for women to improve their businesses. According to Vanderveldt’s website, EBW works by “getting $1B of credit into the hands of women worldwide, enabling them to create leverage to buy up to $10B infrastructure they need to build and scale [and] creating $100B worth of overall global market impact.” Vanderveldt says the only way to reach this lofty goal of one billion women is through technology–“get a phone in a woman’s hands!” By partnering with Dell to launch this project, they reached 600 million women last year through the program. Ingrid previously worked for Dell as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence and says her personal goal is to be the female version of Michael Dell. Her advice for entrepreneurs is to not be afraid to fail. Her first business venture failed, but she continued to try and try again until she became successful. Vanderveldt said for women to succeed, they need three things: mentorship, financial literacy and technology, with a heavy emphasis on mentorship. She also emphasized that women are part of a “sisterhood,” and by building up each other […]
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