It’s an exciting time at United Way! In addition to recognizing the incredible work United Way and all nonprofit organizations have done to rebuild, revitalize and serve our community since Hurricane Katrina, celebrating the tremendous success of our public policy efforts that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals across our state, and creating a collaborative community impact strategy that will decrease poverty throughout our region, we are also kicking off our 2015 fundraising campaign!
We call it a “campaign” because our goal is to gather support and momentum around our organization’s mission – to increase the organized capacity of people to care for one another in order to create a stronger community for all – and our fundraising target, which this year is $14.6 million. This fundraising goal is a one million dollar increase over last year’s goal, but with the needs of our community being so great and the monumental work that needs to be done to impact poverty in our area, we know that this is a necessary outcome.
We cannot do any of this work alone! Together with more than 1,000 corporate, civic and nonprofit organizations and 21,000+ individual donors who are currently engaged in our campaign, we know that we can get close to reaching our goal. But it will take even more organizations and even more individuals to join our movement and make investments in our Education, Impact and Health impact areas that are changing lives for people in our community.
This year we are thrilled to have a robust Campaign Cabinet made up of industry and civic leaders, all led by our 2015 Campaign Chair, Rick Haase, President & CEO of Latter & Blum Realtors, Inc. Our entire Cabinet will be focused on recruiting new individuals and organizations to invest in our work throughout Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, Tangipahoa and Washington Parishes. The Cabinet has an aggressive goal of securing $1 million in new philanthropic investments. Will this be easy? Absolutely not!
Our Campaign theme is “What This Place Needs”, and most importantly, what this place needs is YOU! We need more advocates, more volunteers and donors to get us to $14.6 million! Our fundraising campaign has officially kicked off, and will wrap up on March 31st, 2016. If you would like to get involved in our 2015 fundraising campaign in any way, please email us and let us know how you would like to help. Please consider recruiting other friends, neighbors and organizations to Live United.
Here’s to a terrific year!