United Way of Horry County (UWHC) has released a new Community Game Plan to show a shift in strategy and how the plan will be put into action through collective impact. Collective impact is the commitment of a group of individuals from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem using a structured form of collaboration.
This plan was developed with the help of community volunteers, who formed four Vision Councils, and assisted the UWHC team in reviewing data from the Community Needs Assessment conducted in 2021, community conversations, and secondary research and statistics to better understand the community's needs.
This Community Game Plan establishes bold community goals in four priority areas: health, education, self-sufficiency, and basic needs. Each area is narrowed down to show the critical issues of Horry County and how UWHC will work to address these primary needs at the root cause. Through the new Community Impact Model, UWHC has adopted this game plan, and it will serve as the basis for grant funding to non-profit agencies and internal UWHC programs.
"UWHC must be a dedicated problem solver who will impact our community's most critical social issues and build a stronger future. Every decision we have made for our new direction will indicate this, beginning with our organization's goal to fund, advocate, educate, and collaborate," states Blakely Roof, President & CEO of UWHC. "We no longer want to be seen as just a fundraising organization. We want to be part of solving Horry County's complex issues, and working towards achieving these goals will require a new way to invest our resources, focus our funding, and build collective impact. This is a new direction for our community fueled by the voices that matter."
The Community Game Plan provides information on local data points regarding the state of education (specifically on ages 0-5 initiatives), health care (specifically on access to mental health resources), finances (specifically on making families more self-sufficient), and basic needs (specifically in unduplicated services of basic needs) in Horry County. Using a results-based approach, UWHC's capacity to make significant, sustained improvements for the well-being of Horry County will be strengthened to allow the community to move from talking about problems to taking actions to problem-solving through data-driven decision-making.
Shifting to this new model has already shown success with a recent award of $602,610 from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant COVID-19 (CDBG-CV) funds for the "Breaking Barriers in Mental Health Program," which provides consistent, onsite, out-patient mental health and substance use disorder counseling services to the homeless, uninsured, underinsured, low to moderate-income and the rural population at no cost.
Original source can be found here.
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