Last year, the University set its most aggressive goal in history for the United Way of Greater St. Louis fund-raising campaign.
And after just two months, the target of $500,000 had been far exceeded.
This year, the bar has again been raised, to $525,000 — echoing this year’s campaign slogan of “More in 2004.”
The 2004 fund drive for the United Way of Greater St. Louis is now under way, and University faculty and staff members should have already received pledge cards in the mail.
“As one of the leading employers in the region, we have a responsibility to carry our share of the support for the United Way,” Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said at a kickoff breakfast Aug. 31 at Whittemore House. “With the leadership donors that have already come forward, and the support that I think is going to be gathered, we should go far in realizing our goal.
“If we can just increase the average participation by 10 percentage points, we would take a major step forward in supporting the United Way.”
If you think that contributions made will get divided among several power brokers, middlemen and corporations — think again.
Fully 90 percent of contributions to the Greater St. Louis United Way goes directly to providing services for people in the community, making it one of the highest assistance rates in the country.
A gift of $100 can provide any one of the following: five days of food for a family of four; 14 hours of after-school tutoring for high-risk youth; eight hours of elderly personnel care; or 15 books for a lending library.
The region is on top in another area, too. Despite being just the 18th-largest metro area in the nation, St. Louis has ranked eighth in terms of support for the United Way for at least the past three years.
The United Way provides assistance to more than 200 health and human-service organizations in Missouri and Illinois, with one in three people in the region being helped by a United Way-assisted organization.
One of those is Court Appointed Special Advocates of St. Louis County, whose executive director, Allie Chang Ray, also addressed the breakfast. CASA of St. Louis is an organization that provides free-of-charge advocate services for abused and neglected children.
“Our success has very much been founded on the generosity of the community,” Ray said. “In each of the past three years, it has been a little harder for us to meet our fund-raising goals. So as a result, we are out there trying to augment what we receive from the United Way, which is about 15 percent of our annual budget.
“I have often told my colleagues, ‘I am so thankful to have the United Way funds to count on.’ You can’t always count on individual donors because of the individual hardships going on in the past three years. So we count on United Way.”
The campaign officially ends Oct. 22, but the Office of Human Resources will accept pledge cards up to the end of the calendar year and beyond.