Hephzibah Children’s Association has been denied an annual grant from the United Way, bringing their decades-long partnership to an end and leaving Hephzibah scrambling to find a way to make up for the loss of funds.
Hephzibah Executive Director Mary Anne Brown said their day care program has gotten grant money from United Way, and formerly from Community Chest, the local organization that merged with United Way, annually for the past 35 years. In the early years, the amounts hovered somewhere around $15,000 and $30,000. But in recent years, the number has been closer to $100,000. According to Brown, that money has been essential to subsidizing child care costs for day care parents.
The price tag for child care is high, and Brown said that many parents can’t afford the entire cost on their own. Of the 600 children served in its day care program, Brown estimated that some 150 to 200 kids are being helped by this money.
“It supports the working poor,” Brown said. “It supports those parents who work in Oak Park but can’t afford childcare.”
The program serves children from kindergarten to fifth grade, and representatives at United Way said the organization’s new focus on education targets younger children.
“Unfortunately, Hephzibah’s early childhood program was not a precise alignment with our early education strategy. Our focus is on children zero to five, ensuring that they have access to high quality early childhood programming and home visitation services,” said Katie Cangemi, director of community investment education for United Way. “Hephzibah is doing very good work but is focusing on an age group that is older than our target population.”
Brown said that back in the spring, when Hephzibah was applying for the grant, it was told by United Way that the organization had changed its priorities. But Brown said that the news of the grant denial still took her by surprise.
“I was absolutely shocked,” she said, adding that the school year has already started for the day care program, and there’s not time for parents to prepare for the cut in subsidies. “It’s not even like they have a transition plan,” Brown said.
But Cangemi said United Way began communicating these changes to Hephzibah, as well as their many other agency partners in the region, more than a year ago. She said the new approach was announced in executive forums held last summer, in a community investment plan released late in the winter, and at technical workshops staged to help partner agencies through the grant process this spring.
Sarah Frick, senior director of marketing and communications for United Way, said that the changes are part of a nationwide movement for local chapters of United Way. “Brian Gallagher, the CEO of United Way worldwide has really called upon local United Ways to move from being known as just a fundraising organization to really a community impact organization,” said Frick.
And it applies to all areas of United Way outreach. “Our three areas that we focus on are income, education and health,” she said. “So we’ve made the transformation to community impact in our income grants, in our health grants that went out last year, and education is the final puzzle piece to that.”
Frick said in these next few days, United Way will be quietly notifying agencies across the region about how they fared in this year’s educational grant funding process, but the information will not be publicly announced until Sept. 9.
But Brown said Thursday that she heard the total allotment of grant money for Oak Park agencies is somewhere around $100,000. It’s unclear which organizations will receive money, and how much will be designated for each.
Meanwhile, Hephzibah has to get the word out to its supporters, many of whom show their support through United Way donations.
“We have a lot of people who designate their money to Hephzibah through United Way,” Brown said. “After 35 years we’re no longer a United Way [agency].”