A 'bold' effort: United Way of Central Alabama leads Bold Goals Coalition to battle ‘stubborn’ social problems

Central Alabama has long faced serious problems in education and public health that can’t be fixed overnight.

“We’ve seen these persistent, stubborn challenges that just go for decades,” said Dan Stephens, vice president of community impact for the United Way of Central Alabama.

This is true despite the fact that the UWCA — in Blount, Jefferson, Shelby, St. Clair and Walker counties — has “an incredible network of partner agencies that do remarkable work,” Stephens said.

But solutions to these problems also require creative, big-picture thinking and the steady, conjoined effort of numerous partners and stakeholders.

That’s why the UWCA created its Bold Goals Coalition in 2014 to help boost the health, education and financial stability of all Central Alabama residents.

The UWCA “decided to play a leadership role in the community in gathering people and organizations, everybody who wants to solve those challenges, to think about it differently and be able to make a measurable difference,” Stephens said.

The Bold Goals Coalition seeks to have all five Central Alabama counties ranked in the top 10 for health outcomes in Alabama by 2025.

The half-dozen individual health goals include operating a senior grocery program, helping people better manage chronic conditions and providing mental health support for students.

The education targets for 2025 are to have 90% of high school seniors college- and career-ready and add 125,000 highly skilled adults to the workforce.

This includes such goals as boosting school attendance and supporting elementary literacy.

The formation of the Bold Goals Coalition by the UWCA was driven by feedback from lots of people.

“We heard from a variety of groups — including the corporate community, nonprofits, other funders and people in communities — that solving our region’s biggest challenges was going to require all of us to step up in a new way,” Stephens said.

UWCA leadership “heard about the need for better alignment, more data-driven solutions and long-term efforts to solve stubborn problems,” he said.

“This is a much better process than doing it individually,” said Samuetta Nesbitt, UWCA senior vice president for public relations and community affairs. “Once we agree on a single goal then we can move the needle,” she said.

These problems also can’t be solved without partnerships. “No one agency could move the needle alone,” Nesbitt said.

It is also important to focus on very clear, reachable goals, with ending summer hunger among area children a good example, Stephens said.

Officials learned that “most children who are hungry get access to free or reduced price meals during the school year, but during the summertime… that’s a lot of time that students go hungry, and it really affects their development and their growth and their well-being,” he said. “We can do something about that, so that became a very targeting way of addressing hunger.”

Goals, if properly focused, have their own power to motivate stakeholders, according to Ryan Parker, UWCA assistant vice president for health and community impact.

“If you cast this big goal that you’re hoping to get to, and get people to see how they can support that, it just gives people kind of energy to work on it,” Parker said.

It is also critical in contemporary nonprofit work to carefully measure one’s progress toward a goal, though this may seem to go against the traditional mode of nonprofits seeking to meet human needs, according to Stephens.

“Most of the time we make those decisions with our hearts, which is a really good thing in a lot of ways, but you also need the numbers to know if, on a regional level, we’re moving the needle,” he said.

The initiative has been successful, Stephens said.

“The Coalition has grown to 200 organizations, with scores of organizations stepping up to take leadership roles,” he said.

The initiative has generated over $8 million in resources for the community, Stephens said.

There are other successes to report, Stephens said.

When the Coalition began, Walker County was at “the very bottom” in county health rankings in the state, but has since moved up several spots, according to Stephens.

In addition, the UWCA and its partners have expanded their early learning and school mental health work into Walker County, he said.

“We know we can move these things,” Stephens said, who called such improvement a “matter of the will and the commitment to do it.”

The coalition has added 200 seats in public pre-K classrooms in Central Alabama.

In 2020, for the second year in a row, every public high school in the five-county service area of the UWCA is taking part in FAFSA, or federal student aid, completion efforts.

The coalition’s School Attendance Action Network is now reaching three school systems and producing substantial reductions in student absenteeism.

The UWCA has “some great data that says because we work together, especially in different counties, using ideas from one county and applying it to another, that we’ve seen the numbers go in the good direction, either up or down,” Nesbitt said.

In addition to some of these successes, the Coalition “has driven important policy changes at the local, state, and federal level and has become an engine behind key regional initiatives,” Stephens said.

For example, The Birmingham Promise — a major education initiative from the city of Birmingham — is “a direct result” of the Building (it) Together workforce development initiative created by the UWCA and its partners.

Building (it) Together was a framework for more effectively aligning education and job opportunities in the area, and The Birmingham Promise is a new public-private partnership that combines secondary and post-secondary apprenticeships with college scholarships.

“We’re seeing Bold Goals expand its impact, and we’re seeing the community embrace the coalition approach as a way to solve problems,” Stephens said.

For more information, including a list of Coalition partners, go to boldgoals.org.