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UNITED WAY OF CENTRAL AND NORTHEASTERN CONNECTICUT T his past year, United Way of Central and Northeastern Connecticut celebrated a Centennial milestone, launched a new strategic plan, opened its new downtown office and entered a strategic alliance with United Way of West Central Connecticut. President and CEO, Eric Harrison, shares more about the organization's accomplishments and what's next. You started this year by launching a new strategic plan for United Way of Central and Northeastern Connecticut. Tell us more about what you're working on? Celebrating our Centennial milestone gave us a great opportunity to increase our impact while also reversing some of the revenue declines we and United Ways across the globe have seen for the last several years. Our answer to that was to identify a signature platform, which is Onward860: United to End Poverty. Since arriving in Connecticut in 2022, I have done a lot of listening. I've met with our partners, and I held community conversations and interviewed our donors and corporate partners in an effort to truly understand community conditions and what resonates with people. What I've learned in those conversations is that there is a huge sense of town pride in Connecticut but also a strong desire to reduce the disparities that we see town by town. The fact that your life expectancy in the North End of Hartford is 10 years shorter than three miles down the road in West Hartford is unacceptable. So Onward860 is about uniting our region, to create opportunities for success regardless of your zip code. And, United to End Poverty is really about addressing the fact that 40 percent of people in our region live in extreme and working poverty, and we need to mobilize efforts to reduce that number. What is different about this strategic plan? What I'm really proud of is the fact that this plan really looks at every aspect of our organization from our community impact goals to the ways that we are creating operational efficiencies. We are also doing our work differently. We have named 40 strategic partners. These partners receive funding, but they also have committed to being a part of working groups that come together quarterly to co-design initiatives that will impact systems-level change. Through these working groups we also have opportunities to maximize efficiency in our strong nonprofit sector, bring our voices together to advocate for policies that affect the people we serve and our organizations, and most importantly, increase our impact. We have also established a Data Advisory Council which is working on identifying community-level shared outcomes for each working group, which is very exciting. We have heard a lot about revenue declines impacting United Ways but also nonprofits in general. What are you seeing in your work? For several years, United Ways have been experiencing declines in revenue in large part due to evolution and changes in workplace giving globally. As a result, revenue diversification has been a top priority for us, and we are beginning to see success in this area. We continue to work with our corporate partners on employee giving campaigns and we appreciate the generosity and the spirit that workplaces in our region give to the campaign. At the same time, we have increased our focus on grants and philanthropy outside of the workplace to allow us to continue to grow. Over the last three years, we have received four of the largest individual gifts in our organization's history. We have also had opportunities to embark on public - private partnerships to mobilize resources for workforce development, child literacy and emergency response. While times are challenging, people continue to be extremely generous, and we are fortunate to live in a state that is innovative in thinking about how we can affect community conditions. 4 | 2025 COMMUNITY IMPACT REPORT | UNITED WAY OF CENTRAL AND NORTHEASTERN CONNECTICUT