About Us

The goal of the United Way of Franklin County (UWFC) is to support long-lasting change that improves lives. We invest your contributions back into the community to address critical needs and produce results by providing grant funds to programs that focus on:

• Aiding families in crisis—ensuring that everyone has access to food, shelter, medical care, counseling, safe harbor and other essentials.
• Assisting classroom education—supporting educational opportunities to help children succeed as individuals and develop essential life skills; and providing support to teachers to enable them to implement innovative programs.
• Building vital and safe neighborhoods—creating and sustaining an environment where everyone is safe, nurtured and valued.
• Helping children and youth succeed—implementing programs that help children and youth become responsible, contributing citizens through education, character building, leadership training and quality childcare.
• Improving people’s health and well-being—strengthening health and human services county-wide to optimize community and individual health and wellness.
• Meeting basic needs and promoting self-sufficiency—ensuring access to preventive and healing services, training and support so that everyone can meet basic needs and increase their self-sufficiency.
• Supporting the aging population—fostering an environment where all older adults have the ability to be self-sufficient and live as independently as possible.

Funding

The primary sources of funding for the UWFC are: individual donations, payroll deductions (from businesses and local governments), national corporate donations and income from other United Ways.

Use of Funds

United Way of Franklin County strives to operate as lean and efficiently as possible. The office space is generously donated by First Citizens Bank. Local businesses donate both services and goods to assist in every day operations. The Board of Directors approves an amount each year to be distributed to the community partners in the form of community impact program grants and educational grants. The amount awarded in 2007 for Community Impact Program Grants was $112,341 and $20,648 for Education Grants. The United Way is able to make such investments due to low administrative costs.

Grant Allocations Process

Each year approximately 50-60 Franklin County citizens volunteer to serve on review panels to evaluate grant proposals received by the United Way. Various organizations and agencies in the community present their request for funding proposals to the review panels who in turn make a recommendation to the Community Impact (CI) Grant Allocations Committee, a standing committee of the Board of Directors. The CI Grant Allocations Committee, working within the confines of a given budget, will then make its recommendations to the Board of Directors. The Board ultimately makes the final decisions based on substantial community input. Community Impact Program Grant applications are available each year in early March and Education Grant applications are available in late August. To date, the United Way has distributed more than $1.6 million in the form of program grants, education grants, emergency and disaster relief funds.