The Community Chest of Oak Park-River Forest has pledged $75,000 in funding to Hephzibah Children’s Association this year, to help make up for the funds lost when Hephzibah was denied a $100,000 annual grant from United Way.
The grant denial, announced quietly to Hephzibah Executive Director Mary Anne Brown on Friday, brought to a close the decades-long partnership between Hephzibah and United Way and left Hephzibah scrambling to find a way to make up for the loss of funds.
The Community Chest, which was established to raise funds for local health and human services efforts in 1935, eventually turned over its fundraising efforts to United Way in 2003. Since then, Community Chest has been using its endowment income to grant funding to various local organizations in Oak Park, River Forest, and Forest Park.
Before the $75,000, the Community Chest has approximately $1.8 million in its endowment, which continues to generate income.
“We know how important Hephzibah is and how beloved it is to the community and how much great work they do,” said Community Chest board President Barbara Watkins, of their decision to step in.
Brown said Hephzibah’s day care program received grant money from United Way — and formerly from Community Chest before it merged with United Way — on an annual basis for the past 35 years. In the early years, the amounts hovered somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000. But in recent years, it’s been close to $100,000 annually. According to Brown, that money has been essential to subsidizing child care costs for parents.
Of the 600 children served in its day care program, Brown estimated that some 150-200 kids are being helped by this money.
“It supports those parents who work in Oak Park but can’t afford child care,” Brown said.
The program serves children from kindergarten through fifth grade, and representatives at United Way said their 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, 0-5, 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 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 no time for parents to prepare for the cut in subsidies. “It’s not even like they have a transition plan,” Brown said.
But the Community Chest board was abreast of the changes afoot at United Way and knew several months ago that there was a possibility Hephzibah wouldn’t get the grant. So the board voted in early July to fund Hephzibah in the event that United Way denied their grant application.
“We knew there were some issues with Hephzibah and the services they provided not fitting perfectly into this education impact model,” Watkins said.
Cangemi said United Way did begin to communicate their 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 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.
Brown said Thursday that she heard the total allotment of grant dollars 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].”
Brown said the new funding is good news, but it should have been granted by United Way.
“The Community Chest [money] is for a year; it’s not a promise forever. They’re helping us out.”
It’s also $25,000 short of what was expected, and Brown said they’ll have to raise that money somehow. “I can’t put this expense back on parents who are doing everything they can to stay employed.”