The board of the United Way of Garland County voted last month to change the agency's name to United Way of the Ouachitas to better reflect the area it serves, Jane Browning, executive director, said Wednesday.
The name change will be communicated to the public over the next year and be made official in January 2017, when United Way celebrates its centennial year.
"We've been the United Way of Garland County, and it came home to us last year when we were doing site visits to our partner agencies that none of them exclusively served Garland County," Browning said.
"Most of the groups we fund are dealing with a service area that is multiple counties, such as the American Red Cross, which serves 15 counties in southwest Arkansas, the Ouachita Children's Center, which accepts children from all over the state, First Step, which has a big operation here, but also has one in Glenwood, Malvern and Arkadelphia, and Our Promise, which has patients that come in from Oklahoma for treatment," Browning said.
After viewing a map of the different geological areas of Arkansas during the agency's January board of directors' retreat, the board agreed to change the name of the agency to reflect the area in which it serves, she said.
Browning said the board of directors also adopted a new vision statement stating the United Way of Garland County "envisions a community where all individuals and families achieve their full potential."
"It's a few words, but a large vision," she said.
The board also adopted a new four-part strategic plan, Browning said. The key parts are as follows:
ā¢ Strengthen community investment results and build partner networks that address community needs.
"That means raise more money," she said.
ā¢ Enhance donor interaction and provide meaningful opportunities for donors to give, advocate and volunteer.
"We want to cultivate real relationships with the employee groups throughout town. It isn't just that we're asking for their money and nothing else; we want them to be engaged in the community and the kinds of partnerships that we have with our social service agencies," Browning said.
ā¢ Advance public perception (of the agency) as the community mobilizer and developer.
Browning said the agency is not just a conduit for funds flowing through the community, but it brings people together around many different issues. Since the beginning of the year, people involved with the Point in Time homeless count have used the agency facilities, 45 people have attended training on emergency response planning for nonprofits, and two teams of volunteers have attended training on how to review grant proposals that come into the agency.
"This is a very busy place where people are coming in and learning skills, and doing projects all the time, so we want to increase the public awareness of our position here that we're a place where they can come to really engage with the community," she said.
ā¢ Develop a high-performance organization.
"Some of that is keyed around honing our electronic skills and becoming much better with our technology. We are going to relaunch our website over the next few months and that is all part of changing our name. This is going to be a big deal and we're going to roll this out over the course of the next 12 months, and be sort of official when we relaunch the website in January 2017, our centennial year," she said.
Browning said another important part of the strategic plan, and the purpose of the community assessment, was to see if the agency could target the money it, along with employers and employees, invest.
She said the agency wanted to target those funds specifically on a topic area -- childhood poverty -- that can show communitywide impact.
"You can't work on childhood poverty without working with parents, so it encompasses all age groups, so that is the focus. We want all the partners we're working with to have a high consciousness as to how their program is impacting children in poverty, helping to break the cycle of poverty, and helping to lift families out of poverty," she said.
"Every program can point itself toward that population and be conscious that this is a real problem. If we don't grapple with it in Hot Springs, we could go over the tipping point and watch the community run down. We have to intervene, lift people up, improve employment and education; all those things," Browning said.
Local on 02/11/2016