Help Where It's Needed Most

It was 12:07 p.m., and the line was forming already. A woman with a small child in tow. A man in scuffed work boots and a leather jacket. Two women with gray hair and wrinkles. Two more with neither.

Action and Community Through Service (ACTS) doesn’t open its food pantry until 1 p.m. on Tuesdays. But that didn’t stop the needy of eastern Prince William County from lining up early outside the “food building” just off U.S. Rte. 1 in Dumfries.

If they lined up late, explained Frances Harris, the executive director, they might miss out on the best items—or miss out altogether.

ACTS has been partially funded for many years via United Way of the National Capital Area. Distributing free food to the needy has long been one of its cornerstone programs. But in 2009, the need for the program has intensified.

“Seven years ago, we’d see 30-40 households a day,” said Harris, a former Marine Corps captain who has run ACTS for nearly two years. “In the last three weeks, it has been 100 households a day.”

Who are these additional people? “People who had been making a pretty decent living,” Harris said. But they may have lost a job recently, or had a house foreclosed, or both.

“We’re starting to see real estate agents who haven’t sold a house in two years,” explained Chris Caseman, a relationship manager for UWNCA and a Prince William County resident for three decades. ACTS still serves what Harris calls its “chronically low-income population.” But now some of the people in line are first-timers. Uncomfortable first-timers.

“They are embarrassed. Yes, they are,” she said. Some don’t want to stand in line outside the food pantry “because they don’t think they’re one of them.”

Yet it’s all one community in the lobby of the ACTS food pantry. The great majority of people who seek services of any kind there are locals—often longtime locals. And the food comes from locals, too.

“In the summer, we get donations of fresh fruits and vegetables from the farmers’ market,” Harris said. “Groceries, schools, churches, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, they’re all involved” in running food drives throughout the year, she said.

But a key piece of the puzzle is dollars. And in that department, United Way of the National Capital Area is a significant player. ACTS’ budget is approximately $2.5 million this year. UWNCA donors supply about eight percent of that total. If that sum disappeared, “We simply couldn’t do everything we need to do,” Harris said.

“This community really doesn’t want this community to go hungry,” Harris said. As a result, she doesn’t expect UWNCA funding to dwindle or die. But she could always use more, especially since there’s no obvious end to the increased need. “We’re pretty even with the demand,” she said. She’d like to stay there. UWNCA can help that happen. It has the track record. It brings help where it’s needed most.

A Lifetime of Giving

She likes to call it “our United Way.” But she could very well call it hers.

Frida Burling is 94 years old. She has been a donor to—and a champion of—United Way of the National Capital Area for 74 consecutive years. No one in the Washington area comes close, either in consistent giving or passion for the cause.

Seventy-four years……. That’s 11 presidents, four major wars, three Washington baseball teams, two husbands, three children, 47 living descendants. Yet for Frida Burling, United Way has been a constant.

“It’s not only a duty, it’s a pleasure,” she told me, over tea and cookies in the living room of her Georgetown home one afternoon this week. “It’s an honor to help people who need it.”

Frida Burling ascribes her philanthropic spirit to a bumpy—and occasionally poverty-stricken—childhood.

Her parents split up when she was a girl, and her mother had to seek shelter from Frida’s grandparents, who lived in Washington. It was not a hand-to-mouth existence, but it wasn’t close to luxurious.

“Having grown up realizing how bad it can be, I can empathize with” Washington’s poor, she said. “I can ache for hungry children.”

Frida had her debut at 18, and joined the Junior League (an upper-crust women’s group) at 20. Through Junior League, she raised her first funds for a forerunner of United Way. “It’s what you did,” she explained.

Through both of her marriages, raising money—and donating it—became a way of life. “I worked at selling real estate when I was married to my first husband, but my heart was in helping the community,” Frida said. She has never stopped doing it, across nearly three-quarters of a century.

Her second husband, Edward Burling Jr., was a founding partner of one of the city’s oldest and best-known law firms, Covington and Burling. When they married in 1959, “I realized that I didn’t have to sell real estate any more,” Frida said, with a wink.

“Eddie loved horses. I didn’t care about either end of a horse.” Instead, Frida worked tirelessly as a board member and fundraiser for several Washington non-profits, all of which serve children and families. Meanwhile, she gave and gave and gave to United Way.
Frida says it won’t end until she does.

“Anything I can do, I would be glad to do,” she said. “Anything.”

Always Remembering the Human Dimension

Success in business doesn’t just fall out of a tree and hit you.

It’s built wide and deep. It depends on knowledge of the marketplace, but also on attention to detail. Most of all, it depends on identifying—and always remembering—the human dimension. It won’t work as a business unless it hits people in the right way, and gets them to open their wallets.

Abe Pollin lived these principles throughout his 60-plus years as a businessman in Washington. But he also lived them as a philanthropist.

He never made shallow, quickie, one-time donations. His were wide, deep and strategic. His always identified the human dimension. His always built a broad base, not just a snapshot of the donor in tomorrow’s Style section. Not surprisingly, Abe Pollin was a longtime donor to United Way of the National Capital Area—and a generous one.

As a member of UWNCA’s Tocqueville Society, he gave large, but he also gave across the spectrum of UWNCA’s hundreds of member agencies. Pollin was all about building a community, not a single cause. He long ago recognized UWNCA as a great vehicle through which to do that.

Pollin’s sports empire depended on attracting ticket-buyers of all kinds, from all across the metropolitan area. He did it very successfully. It was the same ground-level strategy that attracted him to UWNCA, and kept him attracted.

Pollin once told me that he knew that the social problems of the Washington metropolitan area were too big for any one non-profit to solve. So he gave to the organization that provides funds to dozens of them. Funded across the board, working together, these agencies have a far better chance of success than they’d ever have working separately. Pollin “got” that, throughout his life.

Nothing ever prevented Abe Pollin from writing a check to a single organization, and nothing prevents anyone else from doing the same. But if a rising tide lifts all boats, it does that double in the world of philanthropy.

Abe Pollin was a rising tide kind of guy. He always saw across the region, not just one organization and one street corner at a time.

Any man who fired Michael Jordan is a man who doesn’t doubt his own judgment. But as a philanthropist, Pollin knew that his judgment had to change, and change, and change again.

He was deeply and permanently in love with his adopted home town. But he knew that local social issues would always change. So would the organizations. So would the personalities. What better way to help the community solve problems new and old than to give to the one organization that has stood the test of time in local philanthropy?

Rest well, Mr. Pollin. Your example inspires all of us at UWNCA, and always will.

It's Easy Not to Notice...

Last week, I visited with top management and staff at BAE Systems, a major defense consulting firm based in Rosslyn. They’re considering ramped-up participation in UWNCA. But they weren’t clear on the need for it in the Washington area, because so many of them are relatively recent transplants.

I had the chance to speak to their team and shared the following:

"It’s very easy not to notice need in the Washington area. After all, our region includes a few of the five richest counties in America, per capita — Fairfax, Loudoun and Montgomery.

If you try to get a seat in the Metro during the morning rush hour, you usually can’t — because so many people are going to work. If you walk around a ten-square-block area in downtown Bethesda, you can find more than 100 white-tablecloth restaurants. The Washington area looks like the one place that the recession missed but, the reality is vastly different. Financial uncertainty is everywhere, of the same kind and in the same proportions as anywhere else.

My friend Lynn Brantley, the head of Capital Area Food Bank, told me a few months ago that she is seeing people at her front door that she has never seen before. They are ‘pushouts,’ she says — people who have always had enough money to put food on the table, but now cannot, because of layoffs.

It’s up to the entire community to bridge this gap. And UWNCA is the best way to do it. Not only can dollars be designated to individual agencies via UWNCA, but they can be aimed at complicated community problems via our Community Impact program. Rather than giving just to one agency, or several, a donor can attack an entire problem by giving to agencies that all deal with it in some way.

This strikes me as just so bloody intelligent. Via UWNCA, comprehensive solutions are possible. This is an organization that listened to what the problems really are —how deep and how wide -- and devised a way to tackle them."

Nods and smiles were everywhere in my audience. We’ll see if dollars soon are too. In the meantime, I hope everyone at UWNCA and in the wider community will appreciate what this organization has always done, and can still do.

It Was All About Fitness...

Mark Jenkins is a 39-year-old Navy veteran who fought in the first Gulf War. He has served as a personal trainer to such stars as Puff Daddy and Mary J. Blige. You can tell from 100 feet away that he’s in better shape than you are—or ever will be.

But he almost met his match on Wednesday—first from a dozen students at Neval Thomas Elementary School in Northeast Washington, then from 45 staff members of UWNCA.
It was all about fitness, the desire to achieve it and the work that it takes to get there. After leading the students through a 30-minute series of exercises, and the adults through 20 minutes more, Jenkins had this to say:“They can all be in better shape. But they all had the right attitude.”

Instilling fitness via a positive approach is the centerpiece of a UWNCA program that will be rolled out around the region in the first five months of 2010.

Called Fun, Fly and Fit, the program has been under construction for the last nine months, under the leadership of UWNCA’s Euniesha Davis. FFF will be introduced into 11 area schools between January and May. It may eventually grow to 100 schools and extend to workplaces, Euniesha said. FFF is a major UWNCA priority, according to CEO Bill Hanbury.

Wednesday’s kickoff event featured huffs, puffs and (among the adults) grimaces but, it also featured determination.

“We all have work to do. We could all be more fit, including this guy,” said Hanbury, as he pointed at himself. “But we’re all trying to be committed to it.”

Thomas students weren’t quite ready to make such a promise. But they were intrigued.
When Jenkins demonstrated a drill where students hopped from circle to circle while pushing a ball in front of them, the kids elbowed each other out of the way to be first in line. When he gave them red jump ropes and demonstrated, they followed with a smile. When he told them to feel their biceps while jogging in place, the kids did so—and they looked pleased at the power they found.

“We have some children who are having a problem (with weight control and fitness),” said Ruth Barnes, Thomas’s principal. “But we are working with nutrition,” she said. FFF will be “welcome at the school,” she said.

Mark Jenkins did not baby the casually clad adults from UWNCA. No sooner had they taken their places around the linoleum floor of the Thomas auditorium than Jenkins asked:
“Whose first workout is this in the last two months?”

Several sets of eyes fell sheepishly to the floor but, there were few dropouts as Jenkins led the group through a regimen of bending, stooping, squatting, swaying, stretching and throwing mock punches.

“You’ve got to find a way to get the workouts in, people,” he said. No one promised, but no one disagreed, either. Jenkins told the group that 30 minutes of exercise a day, five times a week, will add a year to one’s life, and reduce the chances of cardiovascular disease by 50 percent. That drew nods and murmured vows.

It was just one nice autumn day in Northeast Washington. But for UWNCA’s staff, it may have been the start of a whole new lifestyle.

"Would You Like To Support United Way?"

The year was 1967, but the memory is still fresh.

A woman marched up to my desk in the crowded newsroom of The Washington Post. I had worked there for a week. Finding the men's room and the cafeteria were still major challenges.
"Would you like to support United Way?," she said.
I had never heard of it.

I had grown up in another city, gone to college elsewhere, knew very little about the Washington metropolitan area. I had never given a nickel to any charity because I hadn't had a nickel to give.
But the woman said something to me that day that made this leopard change his spots.
"United Way unites us," she said. I immediately made a donation. I've done so for each of the last 42 years. And now I'm inside the belly of the beast.

In early November, I signed on to the staff of United Way of the National Capital Area. My job will be to sing the song--explain why a dollar given to United Way is a dollar that makes us all stronger. This blog will be one important place where that song will get sung.

I doubt that I can make the case more crisply than my colleague made it more than four decades ago. So let me build on her choice of words. This is a community with terrific strengths, yet underlying weaknesses. We are as vulnerable to social and economic troubles as any place else. And we have always been generous about donating money to address those problems.
But we're a community that embraces parts of two states and all of an unusual place called the District of Columbia. There can be only one solution to the problems of the area as a whole. It's called United Way.

Like Superman, it leaps borders in a single bound. It doesn't offer an Alexandria solution, a Hyattsville solution and a Northeast Washington solution. It wraps the entire metropolitan area in one blanket and says: "A gift from anyone is a gift to everyone."

No other organization does that as widely or as well. No other organization aims donated dollars so quickly or so closely at the problems they can fix. No other organization treats every need and every nonprofit organization with the same degree of importance. I work for UWNCA because of that philosophy.

This isn't a place where solutions rain down from 30,000 feet. This isn't a place where politics and status dictate who gets help and who doesn't. This is a place that seeks ground-level answers, finds them, funds them and makes sure that even the smallest pieces of the solution won't get overlooked.

Best of all, United Way seeks out community-based decisions and decision-makers.
In each of the eight areas it serves, a board of volunteers meets regularly. It and it alone decides how to allocate Community Impact funds in that jurisdiction. No government official or UWNCA official puts his thumb on the scale.

Community Impact money is allocated to fix an entire problem, not just to fund one agency. So, for example, if Falls Church has an issue with teenage pregnancy, volunteers in that community can fund education programs, health programs, after-school programs and possibly others. It's all up to them.

I'd be happy to discuss UWNCA with anyone, at any time. My e-mail address is blevey@uwnca.org. Don't be bashful. If you'd like more information about making a donation, I'd be happy to discuss that, too.

The annual United Way campaign is in high gear throughout the fall. This would be an excellent time to support our community. It would be an excellent way to say what I began saying 42 years ago: This is my community, and this is my way of uniting us.