And United Way paid the premium thanks to a great partnership with UW Health. And she was able to get treatment. I asked her, ‘How are you doing?’ And she said, ‘I am in remission and I am healthy.’ Isn’t that amazing. I said, ‘How are your boys?’ And she said that they are thriving. Think about this. She said, ‘In my next job, they asked me to give to United Way. So I made a gift.’ Isn’t that perfect?  She had a community center funded by United Way grants to be able to get a connection. Then she was able to work with 211, a service provided by United Way. And then a major gift partnership of United Way that brokers healthcare access for individuals, got her health insurance.”

In order to deal with the turbulent change, United Way and its partners continue to help meet the need”

“I think we’ve been really trying to help the community to understand the impact on neighbors,” Moe emphasized. “And I’ve been really inspired by how particularly the business community and individual donors are responding. People want to volunteer. They want to get involved. From that perspective, I would say United Way is doing well because we are seeing more people stepping up to care about the issues, showing up with their dollars and their time and ultimately trying to get more resources to non-profits and families. We’re even trying to frame that more broadly from the perspective of poverty and also what we call ALICE, Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained and Employed, the working poor. They are people who are working, sometimes multiple jobs. And trying to make sure that service delivery is set up for that population. I think the most obvious thing that everyone is talking about is housing costs, food and gas prices. If you are making this much and now you spend this much more on housing and your basics, that’s what’s creating a lot of instability and it’s just harder to make ends meet in the current environment.

It’s also important to while figure out how to use finite community resources efficiently and humanely.

“One thing that I’ve noticed is in the first 20 years or so of my career, we talked a lot about non-profit coordination and making sure that there was more alignment around larger strategies and goals and helping individual families and neighborhoods. And I really think now that there is an opportunity for funder alignment. How do you help more people who are giving philanthropically or who are putting dollars into non-profit services to be able to make those dollars stretch further, especially considering some of the external environments. It’s an honor to partner. We believe in mutually-beneficial relationships both for non-profits and for funders in helping families, which is the bottom line. That’s what we are really trying to facilitate. And I think that we are doing that well.”

And so the concerted effort is trying to make a difference, especially families most vulnerable to the changing landscape.

“The Community Resiliency Delegation teed up as soon as we saw a lot of those federal changes happening,” Moe said. “We’ve raised a significant amount of money to help partners who are involved with service delivery so that we can keep that root cause work going. But people need a little extra help right now with some of that basic needs like housing and food. That’s a big deal with our Community Resiliency Delegation. It was led by Karen Timberlake and Chris Copeland. Karen is the former secretary of Health at the state of Wisconsin. She’s now at Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Chris is a leader at TruStage. He is one of their executives. And we had a really wonderful coalition of non-profits, community leaders, faith community and many others come together and say what is going on in the community and how do we help channel resources to help non-profit services and families.”

Not only have federal budget cuts reduced the funds available for human services, but federal legislation has also changed the rules of the games, with all of this happening without notice.

“It’s really a challenge,” Moe said. “Not only are those resources finished, you also have a lot of the work and volunteer requirements that are starting January 1 due to that compression. When you think about food, housing, healthcare, childcare, all of those things, I talked to a woman at a pantry not too long ago. I asked, ‘Are you worried about Medicaid changes?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m on BadgerCare.’ I asked, ‘Did you know that Medicaid is BadgerCare?’ She said, ‘No.’ I gave her the number of 211 and said, ‘Why don’t you call and see if there is some eligibility for HealthConnect and find out more about what is going on. The landscape is going to change for you. I want to help you be prepared.’ I think these are the types of conversations that are going on all over the place. There is a lot of shifting happening. Thankfully, there is a lot of good discourse and dialogue about impacts on people. But the stuff that is scooped out is going take a while to rebuild, reframe and design anew. We want to be there to help with as much community resiliency as we can so that people can stay whole and hopefully not tip into those places that are much harder to climb out of.”

While problems are often discussed in silos, problems like food scarcity, the high cost of housing and mental heal, these issues are actually interconnected in terms of how they impact children and families.

“People don’t always understand that when you have financial pressures that parents aren’t able to necessarily have as much bandwidth to parent, helping kids stay in school,” Moe observed. “And so the ability to help keep families whole, get kids ready for school and help them all the way through to whole, confident humans and can then go on to achieve their own self-defined goals, that’s all interconnected. And I think sometimes, if you haven’t seen that full perspective in the community, you don’t necessarily know that. And so that is part of our job is to help people understand and also engage with it so that everyone is able to be more successful. We can see it. We can see what happens with housing affordability. You end up with more stress, more homelessness, more kids who are disconnected, more violence, mental health issues and more addiction. Those are all things that are predictable. And so what can we do to be proactive to help to make sure that we keep families whole and keep individuals whole.“

While Madison and Dane County are in the midst of this turbulent change, besides United Way, community generosity and concern are a constant that hold the community together.

“I think there is an increase in giving,” Moe observed. “I’m seeing three things. Number one is understanding that a lot of people are much more compressed. And I think we’re also seeing that people who have wealth are seeing that their stock market and other investment returns are actually doing well along with tax breaks. The second one is with a part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, HR 1, was there is a lot more incentive for charitable giving. I think that whole bucket is incentivizing for philanthropic giving. The third one is around the Dan and Patti Rashke gift. The Dan and Patti Rashke (TASC) Family Foundation Gift really stepped in in a big way. For the next 10 years, they are underwriting United Way’s administrative costs. And that allows 100 percent of individual giving that is unrestricted toward the Plan for Community Well-being to go towards impact. And that is huge because I think that there is still a sense of United Way being a pass through versus being a multiplier and amplifier. And so that takes out that barrier. By them supporting the administrative costs, their goal is to inspire more giving. Their whole hope is to get more people engaged in giving, in learning about the community and civic leadership. I would say those three things are what is creating much more generosity that we are seeing at least here in Dane County. The divide still is 86 percent for services and 14 percent for administration. But they are covering the 14 percent for all individual givers who are giving to United Way’s investment process. That is huge. And it is a 10-year commitment.”

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a down-turn in giving in 2020, but Moe has seen an uptick in overall community giving.

“We’re recovering,” Moe said. “We did stall for a while. We lost a number of businesses in the pandemic and after. People were just really trying to figure out how to keep their businesses going. When Larry Barton was the chair, we really aimed to stabilize that loss. When Kim Sponem was the chair, we were able to build some of that back. And this year, I feel like we’re all fully operational. The community has helped define what the expectations are that they want United Way to make a difference in these areas for the next 5-10 years. And we have aligned all of the resource development volunteers to go after that and really help the community understand.”