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.
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.
posted by Bob Levey's United Way at
12:27 PM
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