Foreward
We are honored to introduce United Way’s Equity Strategy Guides to our trusted friends and colleagues across the network.
Your United Ways, much like ours, may not be identical, yet we are shared in our values, our vision, and our commitment to addressing the racial disparities affecting our communities.
At a critical point in our history, our network is presented with an extraordinary opportunity to respond, recover, reimagine, and rebuild who we are as a movement and what we represent. The unequal systems and structures affecting the root causes of racial inequities are more apparent than ever. These are times United Way was built for. The time for action is now.
Deploying the concrete approaches in these strategy guides to address your community’s most pressing disparities will put your United Way on a long-term path to creating lasting, equitable change. You will find many of the strategies outlined in this resource will compliment work you are already doing or are included in your existing efforts and can be easily targeted, scaled and combined with other strategies to create more equitable access to Childhood and Youth Success, Economic Opportunity, and Health.
Leaning into this explicit equity work within our own communities has returned new stakeholders and partners who now see us for who we truly are – a force for equitable and systemic community change. We are witnessing the value this impact work is returning to our organizations, lifting our relevance, strengthening our standing in the community and driving revenue to broaden our reach.
A female philanthropist, a priest, two ministers, and a rabbi found common ground in 1887, and today we are calling on our network to stand up as an agent of equitable change for those most disproportionately impacted by structural and systemic racism.
Extraordinary growth lies ahead for our communities, but we must be steadfast in our conviction to ensure all people have opportunity and access lest we risk further entrenchment of broken systems and institutions.
With action, we will make our vision of a more equitable future a reality for all. Join us in our fight.
Living United,
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Keisha Browder |
Michael Williamson |
