United Way of Anderson Marks 80 Years of Community Service

There is a board in the conference room at United Way of Anderson County that functions as a local census of responsibility. It lists campaign chairs, community-impact chairs, and board chairs — the business leaders, educators, physicians, nonprofit workers, civic regulars, and public-minded citizens who have spent some portion of their lives trying to answer a question that communities are forever asking: Who needs help, and what, exactly, can be done?

The names span 80 years and include such folks as the McDougall family, Dr. Kirk Oglesby, and Cara Hamilton of Tri-County Technical College, the organization’s current board chair. The board is not a complete history of Anderson County, but it comes close enough to suggest how charitable life works in a place like Anderson when people are recruited, invited, persuaded, and are simply unable to refuse when the call comes.

On Thursday, United Way of Anderson County will mark its 80th anniversary at Bleckley Station, celebrating an institution that began in 1946 as the Community Chest of Anderson. Its founding figures, Frank Brownlee and Douglas McDougall Sr., brought together business leaders who believed that the needs of a growing community might be addressed more effectively if charitable giving were organized rather than scattered. The objective was simple, if difficult to sustain: improve Anderson by helping people meet basic needs and find a path toward stability.

Kevin Capell, the organization’s chief executive, describes United Way “a community leader and a convener and a mobilizer.” Over eight decades, the institution has endured economic booms and downturns, industrial changes, storms, shifts in public policy, and the quieter emergencies of rent coming due, cupboards running low, or children arriving at school unready to learn. Its work has changed with the county’s needs, Capell said, because the community itself has kept changing.

That adaptability has become something close to the organization’s central skill. United Way listens, Capell said to residents and to its community-impact partners, those agencies whose work places them closest to hunger, housing instability, health needs, family crises, and the challenge of low wages. Sometimes the response is built for a year, sometimes it is a three- or five-year effort. But the basic challenge remains the same, to identify the gap, gather the people who can help, and attempt to close it before the gap becomes an abyss.

Anderson County Councilman Chris Sullivan who serves on the United Way Board of Directors sees his service as following in the footsteps of his father who served on a number of boards and commissions for years, leaving Sullivan with the impression that giving time to a community is less an extracurricular activity than an obligation of belonging.

He said the United Way is one of the county’s essential charities, a network of agencies and volunteers that can often respond to hardship more flexibly than government.

“If we can have these agencies in place to help foster all this goodwill and help people in need,” Sullivan said, “I like being a part of that.”

United Way’s programs carry names that can sound unusual until one considers the problems they are meant to solve. Camp IROC is a summer reading and enrichment program serving children in all five Anderson County school districts, and includes the YMCA which hosts the program, which also provides aftercare for families during the summer months.

The point is to help children reach the third-grade reading level, a threshold that education researchers often treat as a dividing line between students who are learning to read and students who must read to learn everything else. United Way’s Women United affinity group has made childhood literacy a central focus, directing money, volunteers, and attention toward the small interventions that can shape a child’s academic future long before anyone calls it a crisis.

Then there is the Weekend Snap Pack Program, which supplies food for nearly 900 students across the county’s five school districts. The program exists because school meals do not continue on Saturday and Sunday, when many of the students would have no other options for food. Volunteers from churches, companies, and civic organizations fill the gap, packing food for children whose families may otherwise face a hungry weekend. It is the sort of effort that can be measured in bags and boxes but is really about something larger: the recognition that a child cannot learn very well while worrying about the next meal.

Capell said United Way’s three affinity groups — Women United, the Young Philanthropists, and the African American Leadership Society — logged more than 3,000 volunteer hours in the past year, hours that went into programs such as Snap Pack and Camp IROC, but also into answering phones, distributing books, assisting with back-to-school events, and responding after Hurricane Helene. The volunteer, in the United Way model, is not an accessory to the work. The volunteer is the work made visible.

One of the organization’s more recent concerns is a program identified by an acronym that sounds bureaucratic until its meaning becomes clear: ALICE, or Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. These are households that earn too much to fall below the federal poverty line but too little to manage the costs of ordinary life, often referred to as the working poor.

They are employed. They are paying bills, making decisions, raising children, and often doing everything that public rhetoric suggests they ought to do. Yet they remain one car repair, medical bill, rent increase, or missed paycheck away from falling behind.

United Way has worked with community partners such as AIM through its Financial Stability Center to provide coaching and counseling on budgeting, job placement, skills training, and credentials that may help workers move into better-paying jobs. Capell said if a person can learn to budget, gain a certification, improve skills, and raise income, the effect does not stop with one individual. It travels through a family.

This year, United Way also directed more than $125,000 in grants through its community-resiliency work to help people facing gaps in rent, utilities, and other basic needs. Such funding rarely produces a monument or a ribbon-cutting but keeps the lights on, prevents an eviction, bridges a shortfall, and gives a household enough time to remain intact. In the vocabulary of philanthropy, these are interventions.

United Way enters its ninth decade with four stated impact areas: youth opportunity, financial security, healthy communities, and community resiliency. The organization is beginning a strategic-planning process that Capell says will seek advice from donors, community leaders, agency partners, and residents with questions familiar to any institution that has lasted long enough to become part of the furniture: What should continue? What should grow? What has stopped working? What should be left behind?

The answers may not always be comfortable. Community needs change faster than organizations do, and a charity that wants to remain useful must learn when to pivot.

Capell sees the anniversary as an opportunity to do what United Way has done since the Community Chest days: use a wide network of people and institutions to respond to the needs that are closest at hand.

Over 80 years, United Way of Anderson County has raised more than $75 million to support local community partners and initiatives, Capell said. The number is large, but it is also the cumulative result of decades of payroll deductions, annual campaigns, volunteer hours, corporate contributions, bake sales, pledges, committee meetings, and the old community habit of people deciding that somebody’s problem ought not remain theirs alone.

The anniversary celebration will honor people who have shaped United Way’s history, but its larger purpose is forward-looking. The organization’s ambition, Capell said, is a community “where all can thrive.”

After 80 years of food packs, literacy programs, emergency grants, financial counseling, disaster response, and volunteer labor, it is a slogan that represents a record of what United Way of Anderson County has repeatedly tried to do by making the difficult parts of life slightly less difficult for the people living through them.