2025–2027 strategic plan - United Way of Southeast Louisiana

Building the Pathway to Prosperity

For more than 100 years, United Way of Southeast Louisiana has worked to eradicate poverty and strengthen communities across the region. Today, families face rising costs, limited access to opportunities, and increasing financial instability. These challenges demand a clear, focused approach grounded in data, community voice, and long-term solutions.

That’s why United Way has set a new direction for the future.

Our Bold Goal

United Way of Southeast Louisiana has committed to a new, long-term Bold Goal.

This goal brings clarity and accountability to our work. It aligns our programs, partnerships, and investments around shared outcomes that improve lives and strengthen communities across Southeast Louisiana.

Understanding ALICE and the ALICE Threshold

ALICE stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. ALICE households earn more than the federal poverty level but still can’t afford the basic cost of living in their communities. These are working families who struggle to cover essentials such as housing, childcare, food, transportation, and healthcare.

The ALICE Threshold represents the minimum income needed to afford basic household necessities without public or private assistance. Households living below the ALICE Threshold include those in poverty as well as ALICE households.

In Southeast Louisiana, ALICE data shows that nearly one in two households falls below this threshold, meaning hundreds of thousands of families are one unexpected expense away from financial crisis. United Way uses this data to better understand community needs and guide investments where they can make the greatest impact.

Rooted in the Blueprint for Prosperity

United Way’s Bold Goal is grounded in the Blueprint for Prosperity, the organization’s long-standing, community-informed framework for reducing poverty and expanding opportunity across Southeast Louisiana.

The Blueprint identifies the conditions families need to thrive and organizes our work around four core outcomes:

Stability Today
Personal Wellness
Prosperity Tomorrow
Vibrant Communities

Along with the Bold Goal, we’re introducing a new strategic plan that builds on this foundation. While the Blueprint sets the long-term vision, the strategic plan outlines how United Way will advance that vision through focused priorities, coordinated partnerships, and measurable progress toward the Bold Goal.

See our 2025-2027 Strategic Plan

How We Create Change

United Way believes lasting change happens when individuals and families receive coordinated support and when systems work together more effectively.

To achieve our Bold Goal, our work focuses on four interconnected impact areas that address both immediate needs and long-term stability:

Healthy Community, improving physical, mental, and emotional well-being
Youth Opportunity, helping young people grow, learn, and succeed
Financial Security, supporting stability today and economic mobility tomorrow
Community Resilience, ensuring families can prepare for, respond to, and recover from crises

Together, these focus areas create the ALICE Pathway to Prosperity, a continuum of services that supports and uplifts individuals living under the ALICE Threshold through a structured, multi-tiered approach. This approach addresses immediate needs and promotes wellness, while also fostering financial security and enabling long-term prosperity.

View Our Pathway to Prosperity Framework

A Communitywide Effort

Achieving the Bold Goal requires shared responsibility. United Way brings together nonprofits, businesses, funders, public agencies, and community members to align efforts, invest strategically, and scale solutions that work.

By listening to community voice, using data to guide decisions, and strengthening collaboration across the region, United Way works to address the root causes of poverty while continuing to respond to urgent needs.

How Your Gift Advances the Bold Goal

Every gift to United Way of Southeast Louisiana helps move individuals and families closer to stability, opportunity, and long-term prosperity.

Donor support fuels the coordinated work required to place 100,000 individuals living below the ALICE Threshold on a pathway to prosperity by 2035. Rather than supporting a single issue in isolation, your gift allows United Way to invest where the need is greatest and where impact can be measured across the region.

Gifts to United Way support:

Programs that help families meet urgent needs while building stability
Community partners working directly with ALICE households across all seven parishes
Case management and coordinated services that help individuals navigate complex systems
Data-driven strategies that track progress and strengthen outcomes over time
Solutions that address the root causes of poverty and improve systems that affect families every day

Flexible, undesignated gifts are especially powerful. They allow United Way to respond quickly to emerging needs, strengthen high-impact programs, and align investments with the Bold Goal and the Blueprint for Prosperity.

When you give to United Way, you are supporting a shared vision for Southeast Louisiana, one where hardworking families have the resources, support, and opportunity they need to thrive.

United is the Way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did UWSELA choose to focus the Bold Goal on ALICE households?

Because ALICE households represent the majority of struggling families in Southeast Louisiana. They earn above the federal poverty level but still cannot cover the basic cost of living. By supporting ALICE households, we strengthen entire communities and reduce the number of families at risk of falling into crisis.

What does “on a pathway to prosperity” mean?

It means ensuring households have the financial, social, emotional, and structural supports necessary to move from instability to long-term well-being. This aligns with the Blueprint for Prosperity outcomes of Stability Today, Personal Wellness, Prosperity Tomorrow, and Vibrant Communities.

How will we measure progress toward the Bold Goal?

Our team is working with The Data Center to identify key poverty indicators, map out clear pathways to prosperity, and develop a tracking and reporting plan. This ensures transparency, accountability, and real-time learning as we advance the goal.

How does this Bold Goal change my day-to-day work?

The Bold Goal provides clarity around organizational direction. While your core responsibilities might not change, the way we coordinate efforts, measure success, and collaborate across teams will evolve to ensure our work collectively drives toward this long-term outcome.

Why are we revamping the grants process?

Because our grantmaking must fully support the Bold Goal. Our updated approach will help us better simplify processes for partners, allocate funding more strategically, and support efforts that address both urgent needs and systemic issues.

What role do community partners play in achieving the Bold Goal?

A central one. United Way cannot reach 100,000 individuals alone. Our partners expertise, reach, and relationships are essential to addressing healthy communities, youth opportunity, financial security, and community resiliency across the seven-parish region.

Why is systems change such a major focus of the plan?

Because programs alone cannot solve poverty. To break generational barriers, we must address structural challenges, including policies, practices, access gaps, and inequities that keep families from thriving.

How will the strategic priorities support achievement of the Bold Goal?

Each priority plays a unique role. Generating Sustainable Resources ensures we have the financial foundation to power long-term change. Strengthening the Team builds internal capacity. Telling Our Story energizes supporters and amplifies impact. Addressing Urgent Needs stabilizes families today. Driving Systemic Change ensures long-term solutions take hold.

What is collective impact?

Collective impact is a strategy that brings people together in a structured way to achieve social change. It is a network of community members, organizations, and institutions learning together and aligning and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change.

Collective impact initiatives utilize five conditions to guide and support their work. The five conditions are:

Ground the work in data and context, and target solutions
Focus on systems change, in addition to programs and services
Shift power within the collaborative
Listen to and act with community
Build leadership and accountability

What is trust-based philanthropy?

Trust-based philanthropy alleviates the inherent power imbalances between funders, nonprofits, and communities. With a commitment to shifting power and building mutually accountable relationships, trust-based philanthropy positions funders as collaborators working alongside nonprofits to meet the needs and dreams of communities who are most removed from conventional power structures.

What is Grant Guardian?

Grant Guardian uses AI to streamline the financial review process for both grantmakers and nonprofits. Grantmakers receive customizable analyses of their grantees’ financial position, while nonprofits simply submit their existing financial documents without having to enter their data into multiple funder-specific forms. This approach helps both parties focus on what matters most, their shared mission of creating impact.

What is case management system?

A case management system can be:

A collaborative process of assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation to coordinate services and ensure individuals receive the support they need to navigate complex medical, social, and behavioral needs.
A Prosperity Center approach where there’s a comprehensive, client-centered process that provides individualized support, coaching and coordinated services to help individuals and families achieve stability, remove barriers, and build long-term economic mobility.
Any type of formal Coordination, Service Coordination, Client Management, Support Management, Patient Navigation, Care Navigation, Case Coordination conducted by a social worker, case worker or other appropriate staff.

What is a Logic Model?
A logic model is a visual roadmap or diagram that maps a program’s resources (inputs) to its activities, outputs, and expected outcomes (short-term, mid-term, long-term), showing the step-by-step cause-and-effect relationships for achieving a desired impact, used widely in planning, evaluation, and for stakeholder understanding in nonprofits, education, and health.

Key Components
- Inputs: Resources needed (staff, funding, materials, etc.).
- Activities: The program’s actions and services.
- Outputs: Direct results of activities (e.g., number of people trained).
- Indicator: a specific, observable, and measurable piece of data (like participation rates, behavior changes, or test scores) that shows if a program’s planned activities are leading to the desired short-, medium-, or long-term outcomes, serving as evidence of success or progress within the model’s framework. Indicators provide the “how we know” for each step, connecting actions to results and making program effectiveness tangible. 
- Outcomes: Changes in participants (short, mid, long-term knowledge, skills, behaviors, conditions).
- Impact: The ultimate, long-term goal or societal change.

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OUR PROGRAMS

United Way offers a variety of options for people to support their community, whether through donations, advocacy, corporate partnerships, or joining one of our groups.