The United Way of America

The United Way of America is a coalition of charitable organizations that has traditionally pooled efforts in fund raising. In the 1990s, more and more United Ways have focused on community building through local partnerships with government, foundations, schools, and other organizations. Each United Way has its own local governing volunteer board. The organization has roots in Denver, Colorado, where in 1887 church leaders began the Charity Organization Society which coordinated services and fund raising for 22 agencies. Many Community Chest organizations, which were founded in the first half of the twentieth century to jointly collect and allocate money, joined the American Association for Community Organizations in 1918. The first Community Chest was founded in 1913 in Cleveland, Ohio. The number of Community Chest organizations increased from 39 to 353 between 1919 and 1929, and surpassed 1000 by 1948. By 1963, and after several name changes, the term United Way was adopted. The organization raises money in a number of ways, chiefly through the workplace, where employees can have automatic payroll deductions for the United Way.

Criticism

Critics decry some policies of United Way as unethical:

Since United Way isn't a charity by itself, but merely an administrative program to synergize fund raising, it adds an additional level of overhead to organizational costs. If money is donated to United Way instead of directly to charitable organizations, a smaller part of it actually reaches its intended targets. Because of this, United Way organizations typically suffer from an administrational overhead of 10%-20% instead of 5%-15% that many other well-known charities have. [1]

Some workplaces that donate money to UW do not follow commonly used ethical procedures when soliciting donations. Employees may be pressured into donating through peer pressure tolerated or even encouraged by management. Non-donating employees may be forced to write a public explanation on why they do not want to participate, or just publicly outed in the workplace. United Way has made public that it doesn't support such measures, but has been slow to react on reports by employees that were coerced in such a way.

Two of United Way's former CEOs, William Aramony and Oral Suer have been indicted over misuse of donations. [2] [3]. Former employees have indicated that in some United Way organizations, awareness of fraud protection measures is low, and that few if any accounting auditing procedures get used. Compared to other nationally-active charitable organizations, UW has less-developed security measures.

Many employers are broadening the charity choices provided to employees by including America's Charities, a federation of over 100 national and local health and human service organizations. America's Charities can distribute 100% of employee contributions to designated charities.