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Our Community Action Planning Process

The initiatives to be pursued within each of United Way of New York City's Community Action Areas were developed through an open and inclusive planning process that drew upon the views and experience of a wide range of community leaders.

In particular, we:

• Conducted exhaustive research -- interviews and literature searches -- in each of the targeted areas, to investigate the scope and nature of the issue, to identify unmet needs and service gaps, and to uncover the best practices and most promising approaches in New York City and elsewhere in the country.
• Formed Planning Committees of key public, private, and nonprofit leaders in the field to discuss and set the specific direction for our efforts.

Decisions by these Planning Committees were guided by several considerations:

• The potential for work in the targeted focus areas to have a strong and measurable positive impact on the lives of the City's most vulnerable residents;
• The presence of government, private funders, academia, and nonprofit agencies committed to contributing critical resources, and willing to pursue collaborative efforts in these areas;
• The potential for "moving the needle" - for establishing concrete target goals and for measuring progress towards those goals.

The potential for parlaying work in these areas into policy decisions and systems changes that will expand their impact beyond the initial projects and communities selected, and beyond the specific and -- of necessity -- circumscribed involvement of United Way of New York City.

Click here to see our Community Action Strategy in progress.