Does the United Way have too much influence?

They are the go-to cover-your-ass charity for big employers, so that no one can find it objectionable when they solicit. Fortunately, you are free to do your own research and find more interesting (if not more deserving) charities.

….the good thing is… that you can designate specifically which ‘organizations’ gets your donations…..... the United Way ‘cut’ would be the same regardless of whether you specify or ‘they distribute’ your funds….....

Whatever centralized power they have is due to corporate donations… at least that’s the ideal model. They try to get their operating budget from corporate donors so that they can attract individual donors with a 100% pass through guarantee. So an individual donor’s money goes directly to an organization focused on meeting the needs of the underserved.

Also, recipient organizations are chosen based on an assessment process staffed by community volunteers. So individual donors who choose to be more active go out and evaluate every applying organization for a variety of different factors. This helps ensure money goes to decent organizations and also incentivizes coordination among service providers in a community rather than duplication of services. Finally United Way can help direct community-wide initiatives such as reduction in domestic violence by raising awareness and ensuring agencies who work toward that end are adequately funded.

So, yeah, they try to be the only game in town, but it’s more of a shell than it used to be in terms of saying what money goes where. Most of that decision making has been delegated to community volunteers.

Lastly, one can donate to any 501(c )(3) in the world via their local United Way with 100% pass through.

So, yeah, it’s sort of the monopoly in terms of giving through the workplace, but there’s a lot of flexibility on the back end. Doing it through work, of course, helps put a bigger feather in your employer’s cap with respect to money raised during a campaign.

I was a United Way chair at my company in charge of a $550,000 campaign, by the way. Also, the info above may not be true for every United Way chapter, but that’s the direction they are all headed.

And you can donate to a non-profit that isn’t on their list if you specify it.

It does make things a lot easier for the charities they represent, especially the ones with a small number of staff members. They can spend more time being charitable and less in fund-raising. Besides, you can always give to the United Way and direct your gift to a specific charity, or you can give to any charity you want on your own.

I think the United Way does a lot of good work, but I dislike the pressure at work to give. Your boss knows if you didn’t give and ruined their “numbers.” At the one job I had that took United Way very seriously the branch stores would compete with each other to see who could get the highest employee participation.

The United Way openly discriminates, and will never see a penny from me.

@kevbo, I feel better after reading your post. I still feel that there is probably some discrimination as @DrBill states. Somehow, I can’t see United Way working, for example, with an abortion clinic and probably not with Planned Parenthood either. I wonder whether they would fund things like Native American charities or inner city art projects.

I can’t speak to that personally. I just know that volunteers would create a de facto community standard. Again though, an individual can donate to any nonprofit and expect 100% pass through.

I assume the non-profit would have to be on some approved list, although I have no idea who would create the approved list. Does the Federal government do this kind of thing?

Well, it’s a tax status or incorporation just like LLC or whatever. The IRS or the State’s Department of Taxation and Revenue does the approving. If they are 501(c )(3) then they qualify. Wiki link—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)

include the closed parenthesis in the link

I have worked for several non-profits that were united way partner agencies, in almost all of them we pulled out of the relationship.

They are a royal pain in the ass to deal with, they underfund programs and keep them to themselves when others that have the time and resources to take them over and run them right.

I would just dontate to the non-profit of your choice directly.