CEO Renee Moe Talks about United Way’s Direction and Campaign: The Power of Coming Together (Part 1 of 2)
United Way CEO Renee Moe has been with United Way of Dane County in some capacity since she was a student intern in the late 1990s.
By Jonathan Gramling
While Renee Moe, CEO of the United Way of Dane County, never envisioned herself as a leader growing up, it just seemed to naturally happen.
“I always did find myself in leadership roles,” Moe recalled. “I remember the leader of the 4-H Club, Carolyn Mann who was a farmer down the road, one day said, ‘You’re a leader. You should become the president of the Northfield Go-Getters.’ And I thought, ‘I’m a leader?’ I think about Girl Scouts and leadership. I was a class president. I did think that I probably did always drift towards more of a leadership role. But no, that wasn’t in my master plan.”
One could say that Moe also naturally drifted into the service to the community that United Way provides. Moe is a genuinely enthusiastic and caring individual. Once she came to United Way 26 years ago, she was hooked on its mission and work.
“My senior year at UW-Madison, I was an intern over the summer,” Moe said. “And then they hired me on October 6th of that year, my dad’s birthday. I’ve been around since 1998. Not in a leadership role, but working on behalf of the community.”
When Leslie Ann Howard retired as United Way’s CEO in 2015, Moe was reluctant to throw her hat in the ring.
“I had some insecurities about what does it mean to be a CEO,” Moe recalled. “Can I do it? And I remember one of my volunteers said, ‘Well who could do it better?’ And I thought, ‘Everyone.’ But then I thought, ‘Who knows the community? Who loves the community? Who has relationships?’ And the board had to make decision. ‘Do we want someone who knows the community and has her own vision or do we want something really different?’ It wasn’t in my master plan. It just evolved. And every time I got in a leadership role at United Way, I remember feeling very nervous. And then I would go, ‘It’s working. We’re doing it. We’re making things happen.’ I really do love the job. And I like the role of CEO because you get to work on behalf of
the community. And so much of what we do is lift up leaders. And so I feel I get to really boost and champion and empower. And that’s a pretty cool feeling.”
United Way is at the epicenter of charitable giving by the community to meet the community’s challenges and needs. It is also deeply involved in the processes of identifying community needs and issues and nthe solutions to at least deal with those problems with the goal to eliminate them., especially as it relates to diversity, equity and inclusion issues. The demands placed on the CEO of the United Way are relentless. Yet Moe wheres it well.
“I feel like we are grinding all the time,” Moe observed. “I also feel like we do that with a joyful heart. I get to be a part of places that can actually solve problems. I don’t have to observe them all and worry about the world. I actually get to be in it in helping to make things better. I try to make things better in every interaction. It is unrelenting. And fundraising, we start from zero every year and we have to raise resources and help people understand what are the community needs and get people approximate to the issues and really connect people who want help to people who want to help in the healthiest ways. There are a lot of tough conversations that happen at those intersections and a lot of learning and personal self-reflection people often go through. But I also feel like there is no work more worthy. And I get to do this work.”
United Way’s role has evolved over time. When it was founded in 1922 as Community Chest, while it raised funds to meet basic community needs — think American Red Cross — it basically played no role or a minimal role in deciding what those needs were. It was primarily a pass-through organization given that Madison’s population was around 100,000 at the time.
But as Madison/Dane County has grown and its demographics have changed, just providing funds to non-profits wasn’t enough. Instead of just ministering to people in need, it increasingly took on the role of combating the societal causes of people being in need in the first place. In the 1980s and 1990s, it underwent a basic restructuring.
“In the 1970s, there were more questions about, ‘We like United Way,’” Moe said. “’We want to give more money. But what are you actually doing to solve problems?’ And I think that is where that mindset came in, which was ‘Agencies submit proposals. We raise money and get dollars out to agencies.’ And it shifted towards more of a strategic vision of change. ‘How do we fund programs and not agencies to be able to try to make a bigger change. The original Schools of Hope project — fast forward to the 1990s — was around helping more kids succeed in literacy. You know the adage. ‘Kids learn to read until third grade. After that, they read to learn.’ We were seeing again and again the results — Black children in particular — of some children not reading as proficiently as other races, comparatively to White students in that particular time frame. And so the conversation in the community was, ‘How do we really look at the data? And how do we do the research about what helps kids learn to read and helping the community support that?’”
It was around this time that United Way began to partner with agencies of color like the Urban League, Centro Hispano and 100 Black Men. It wasa going to engage communities of color to find and implement solutions to the problems that these communities experienced.
“That really became a collective impact type of program,” Moe said about Schools of Hope. “How do we look at our strategic priority and mobilize more resources and have a background of measurements that support more change. Over time, that eventually evolved. We haven’t solved the problem. There are many, many more things that we need to be doing across the board to help all kids be able to read and all of the things that go along with that. But at the time, 29 percent of kids were not reading proficiently down to under four percent. And that was based on the DPI scoring. Over the course of time, schools change, economics change, all of those kinds of things. But what it taught us was to frame up the problem we are trying to solve and how to mobilize more resources.”
In many ways, United Way acts as a community social worker, helping through education to mobilize the community to identify issues and seek solutions. United Way takes great pains to ensure the community that it is not running the show. It is facilitating the efforts of the community to seek positive change.
“It’s individuals in our community who are friends and neighbors, business owners and employees in lots of different places who don’t know about all of the issues that we know because we are in the community to really think through how do we help bring more attention, care and resources into solving problems because we know individual school districts and non-profits can’t solve everything,” Moe said. “But when we have a wider community understanding of a problem and we have people who know enough to care and care enough to ask and ask in ways that actually make a difference centering those who experience the issues and know what the solutions are, we can get more done together.”
As we talk, Moe is always talking about the community coming together because entrenched community-wide problems need a collaborative community response.
“We now have HealthConnect, for example,” Moe said. “That is a program sponsored by UW Health and Quartz. We are actually able to pay health care premium assistance for those just above Badger Care. That is a program that runs out of United Way. There is a program Literacy and Achievement Connections for Math. The Urban League still runs the middle school Schools of Hope. 211 is a program of the United Way. There are more programs that we are running in service to a larger community initiative beyond one individual agency’s mission that require multiple partnerships to help drive more change.”
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