Making community-centered decisions during covid and the home stretch of this year’s campaign

This letter first appeared in the Parkersburg News and Sentinel on March 20, 2021

 Here we are a little more than a year into this strange new world. It’s been on all of our minds the last couple of weeks- “where were we when…..”    “what was the last day of normalcy that….”   “remember when the governor said…”   “has it been a year since?…..”   All of the benchmarks and milestones that our mind uses to create a boundary of time and space. In so many ways it seems unimaginable that we have lived amidst this chaos and uncertainty for a year. In other ways, time seems distorted and it is difficult to capture in our minds a true sense of its passing.

It has been a year of unthinkables, unfathomables, and unprecedenteds.  It has been a year of fear, anxiety, frustration, and fatigue. It has also been a year of hope, inspiration, and opportunity. Just a year ago our United Way was bringing to a close an annual campaign that had been disrupted by a global pandemic. We had halted fundraising efforts and shifted to crisis response. We were concerned about what that might look like for us in the bigger picture, but we made a decision that seemed prudent and community-centered in the moment.

Here we are a year later coming to the end of the next annual campaign that was planned, launched, and executed all within the dark cloud of that same and continued global pandemic. Months ago we began using the word pivot (and quite frankly it’s one of the words I think we are all tired of hearing at this point!!) We tried to imagine when the “right” moment would come when we could “pivot” from crisis response” and move towards fundraising. We naively believed that there would be some clear-cut, concise moment where the crisis would subside and normalcy would be ushered back in.  Somewhere in the middle of the muck, we seemed to come to the conclusion that there would simply be no opportunity to pivot. The crisis would continue to reshape itself, the surge would cycle and repeat, and that anticipated break would not appear.

We recognized that we would have no choice but to run in parallel lanes: fundraising and response.  The dual role wasn’t something foreign to us. We always maintain robust community impact while executing our annual fundraising campaigns. This was different. The demands of the impact were acute and representative of new and emerging needs never before seen or imagined. The needs created by the crisis were layered on top of the already existing needs of our community (remember there WERE needs before Covid that we were already working hard to address!) Simultaneously the pressure of the campaign was enormous. Our community needed this successful campaign more than ever. The needs were overwhelming and mounting. Community partners were counting on us. Our own organization needed to maintain solvency and sustainability for itself. There was so much that demanded our attention and the demands were more critical than ever before. We knew that we simply couldn’t fail…but we worried that we couldn’t actually succeed.

And then we stepped up…. we stepped up as your United Way always does- with confidence, with compassion, with collaboration, and with a solid grasp of what the community needed at the moment. We identified pockets of need. We talked to our natural and established partners. We delivered a community impact initiative at a larger scale than ever before while also running a campaign that looked nothing like the campaigns of decades past. We managed to balance the need for seemingly constant community contact to meet needs with the nearly zero contact space where we needed to raise money. There were endless days that felt surreal for our team. It required innovation (and sleepless nights of brainstorming) to find ways to connect with a donor base that you largely couldn’t see- no events, no workplace visits, no in-person storytelling of our successes. There were at times moments of trepidation as our team needed to be front-facing, in person within the community, to ensure that services and distributions continued; we were often working face to face (layered in uncomfortable PPE) with vulnerable populations who were counting on us. Yet somehow, we found our balance. We found the stamina and energy needed to just keep stepping.

The stamina came from our community. The community that rallied around, cheered us on, sent reassuring notes with their donations checks, and gave that elusive thumbs up Facebook like to tell us that they saw us and they appreciated us. We kept going because of the corporate partners who found a way to make a workplace campaign happen despite their own distractions and challenges. We kept stepping forward because of the checks, sometimes $20 at a time, that reminded us that we serve a community that needs us and believes in us. In the days of exhaustion and frustration, we just kept stepping. We knew you were counting on us!

So here we are. Ten days to the end of our annual campaign. Working hard to cross the finish line strong, vibrant, and energized. We are so very close to our goal to raise one million dollars for the third year in a row. We are so close to being able to close the books on what may be the most challenging annual campaign our organization has ever executed. We need just a little shove to make it through that celebratory tape at the end of the course. Can you help us cross the line? Can you give a few of the last dollars that will help us meet that goal? 

Giving to your United Way means investing dollars right where you live. It means helping your neighbor not sending dollars thousands of miles away where you never know exactly how you made a difference. Giving to your United Way means that you see first hand the difference your gift makes. It means that your generosity is invested locally. Consider being a part of the final push that helps us meet our goal. Be a difference-maker- we need you!

You can make your gift here — thank you for being a difference maker.