United Way : Leveraging Corporate Partnerships For Measurable and Sustainable Change
United Way is a global movement across 48 countries which seeks to leverage corporate, employee and leadership talent for community development. Through its Corporate Giving and Employee Giving Campaigns United Way seeks to successfully engage employee participation in bringing about positive change in their communities from their workplace.
United Way encourages bringing professional management concepts to social work. At United Way especially in India - we are focusing on identifying issues which have high potential to create change. We spend significant time in careful due diligence, evaluating and involving the right partners who demonstrate an ability to understand and solve issues from a big picture perspective. By involving top corporates to lend credibility to our functioning we also ensure that we maintain the highest integrity in fund management and allocation.
Corporates and the corporate leaders of India have partnered with United Way because they understand and appreciate that the United Way Community Investment Process endeavors to point NGOs to the horizon where NGOs need to make sure time and again that they are working on causes and not just symptoms and building an adequate and efficient infrastructure to deliver. United Way strives to make sure that the return on the community investments made by corporates is maximized, measurable and most importantly sustainable.
Efficiency and Effectiveness : Mapping the Return on Community Investment
Although today India is emerging as one of the fastest growing economies of the world, in the midst of this thriving economic boom, there are also some serious concerns facing the future of India. 75% of India's population is below the age of 35 years. However this youthful population is not equipped with adequate literacy or technical skills to earn their livelihood thereby continuing the century old dilemma of India i:e poverty and unemployment therefore directly impacting the education, health and sanitation issues in the country.
Thousands of NGOs have been battling to eradicate these issues by demonstrating and implementing sometimes innovative solutions that make a significant impact. At United Way our mission is to learn from these non-profits and strengthen the mechanism that supports such causes with a focus to support demonstrated innovative, large-scale solutions that have the potential to change patterns across society using replicable models.
Building synergies amongst partner organizations is key to United Way achieving its vision of definitive long term & sustainable change on the social fabric of India. Due diligence is hence one of United Way's key focus area. We at United Way find that this process of due diligence is what takes up most of our working and thinking time. Building partnerships after a well thought out process of due diligence with like minded non-profit and corporate partner organizations, which help translate United Way's vision on ground in their individual spheres of focus and work is critical to our collective success. |
