Advancing the Common Good: Creating Opportunities to Improve Lives
Everyone deserves opportunities to have a good life: a quality education that leads to a stable job, enough income to support a family through retirement, and good health. That’s why United Way of Marion County’s work is focused on the building blocks for a good life:
Nurturing Our Children
Strategic Areas:
- Reducing youth violence, arrests and juvenile delinquency
- Prepare children to enter school
- Improve academic performance
- Develop moral values, healthy social skills, build self-esteem and promote leadership
Strengthening Families
Strategic Areas:
- Strengthen family relationships
- Provide quality, affordable child day care and respite care
- Help families with children with emotional/behavior problems to change behaviors
- Increase parenting skills for parents of young children
Fostering Self-Sufficiency
Strategic Areas:
- Promote independence among the elderly
- Coordinate mental, emotional, physical and health services
- Decrease homelessness by providing shelter and job opportunities
- Help disabled people get and keep jobs.
Meeting Basic Skills and Survival Needs
Strategic Areas:
- Provides food and shelter
- Financial/emergency assistance
- Providing services for victims of abuse and/or violence
- Offering casework and counseling related to crisis situations and emergency services.
Advancing the common good is less about helping one person at a time and more about changing systems to help us all. We are all connected and interdependent. We all win when a child succeeds in school, when families are financially stable and when people are healthy. The goal of our work is to create long-lasting changes by addressing the underlying causes of these problems through our Community Care Fund.
