So you've got 10 days to form your team and sign up.

Yeah.

So next Friday is that deadline, and the reason that we need those folks signed up prior to November 12th, 'cause you might say, "Well, why can't I just sign up close to November 12th?" It honestly takes our staff about, uh, uh, 20 solid days of them working through the 1,500 people that sign up for this-

Okay.

Uh, but if you, uh, need the link there, uh, it'll be inside that portal.

And just click through and make your pledge.

And whatever you could help us with helps us get to the $3.5 million goal that we need for our community nonprofits and 211 and other services that are facing some budget cuts across-

And

folks have been calling.

As we predicted early on when we opened the lines in September and opened up volunteer registration in September, we knew the need was going to be great.

I have a feeling that when more of these leaves start falling, and the weather starts actually being more fall-like, because it happens the same way when we go from winter to spring and spring to summer.

Until you get those cracks of weather, sometimes people don't feel the, oh, it doesn't feel like summer.

It doesn't feel like fall.

Yeah.

So you've got 10 days to form your team and sign up.

yeah and this is just one of the things that United Way is involved in you're also involved in fundraising how's that going

Yeah, so as a reminder, United Way, at least in this community, we kind of serve as at least the platform, the mouthpiece, the chief fundraiser, if you will, for as many things as we can so we can take all that money that comes in and send it right back out to the community in Bering, Cass, and Van Buren counties.

We talked about not only our campaign pace setters that did incredibly well kicking things off.

One of them that's sitting to my left right here from St. Joe Public Schools.

Yeah.

But in addition to that, a $3.5 million goal.

Okay.

I'm going to shake you down before we leave this

yeah and this is just one of the things that United Way is involved in you're also involved in fundraising how's that going

Yeah, so as a reminder, United Way, at least in this community, we kind of serve as at least the platform, the mouthpiece, the chief fundraiser, if you will, for as many things as we can so we can take all that money that comes in and send it right back out to the community in Bering, Cass, and Van Buren counties.

We talked about not only our campaign pace setters that did incredibly well kicking things off.

One of them that's sitting to my left right here from St. Joe Public Schools.

Yeah.

But in addition to that, a $3.5 million goal.

Okay.

I'm going to shake you down before we leave this

Overall, we ended up generating about $7,000 for the United Way fund.

That's great.

Yeah.

So a portion of that...

Throughout the year, really, we've talked about how a lot of organizations throughout the three-county area support United Way in some way.

Obviously, Whirlpool is the biggest supporter because it's one of the biggest employers within the area.

But as a reminder...

Little bit of an edge.

Overall, we ended up generating about $7,000 for the United Way fund.

That's great.

Yeah.

So a portion of that...

Throughout the year, really, we've talked about how a lot of organizations throughout the three-county area support United Way in some way.

Obviously, Whirlpool is the biggest supporter because it's one of the biggest employers within the area.

But as a reminder...

Little bit of an edge.

I get

it.

Because the small details, like if we have a team of volunteers who have decided to sign up and we know the distances between this town and this town, and again, they're working over in this area.

Yeah.

that it's easier to try to get them to do two small houses in two towns than it might be to have them do one big house that somebody else could do.

Those sorts of things that come into play, that's what they think about.

And they've been doing that the last, this is the 16th year for it.

How's that gone?

So what's our update this week,

Zach? This is a busy set of weeks, not necessarily just for us, but certainly for the parents.

School! And educators, administrators, school bus drivers, janitors.

We... are all out as staff at United Way meeting with those community members throughout the three-county area right now as they do a lot of their school kickoff days for the staff and administrators.

We get the chance as United Way staff to come in to each of those three counties and talk about the work that United Way does in the community and certainly ask questions for some financial support in whatever manner we can from the district employees themselves because they often are, again, the first line of understanding what is happening to our families and our communities.

So we rely on them not only as those eyes and ears, but to also kind of be the mouthpiece for programs like 211.

Again, the 211 hotline that you and I have talked about many times over, but as a reminder, it's a free service that is funded by United Ways throughout the state of Michigan and the state as well.

And inevitably, somebody comes up and says, well, call 211, because we know that's out there, and that can connect you to the resources that are available.

That's right, pacesetters.

Yeah.

Only if those folks say, "Yeah, we would love to have you come in, talk about community efforts and support that, that need to occur, get our employees in front of this great service, and also be able to make sure they know about the resources that exist." When, when you allow us to, to have those conversations where we usually start and say, "What's important to you as an organization? How do we connect you with all the people and resources we know about?" When you say yes to that as an organization, boy, does that help us connect with our community and does the work that we need to do, uh, that we set out in our mission statement since 1943 around here.

How do we get more information if we wanna contribute, volunteer, financial? How do we g- how do we find out more?

UWSM.org is the website address, and if you wanna see how to put an employee campaign together at your workplace, it's actually as simple as just, uh, going to the Get Involved menu item, and it'll say a bunch of different things.

You can give, volunteer.

You can advocate for working families in Southwest Michigan.

You can start a workplace campaign.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's just, it's just huge, and, uh, as you might imagine, which I'm sure Maria talked about last week while I was on vacation, is that the number keeps growing every year for seniors in need.

The great thing about having the independence that seniors have in their homes and, uh, being able to, to, to live independently is that, uh, they only are able to typically do so with the assistance of great programs like Meals on Wheels and, uh, you know, a lot of the things hosted at Area Agency on Aging.

But certainly, uh, great volunteer opportunities like this, where we help out seniors who might need just a little leg up and certainly don't wanna, uh, do the, the yard work themselves or the heavy lifting or the cleaning of the gutters or any of the things that might be a little physically, uh, demanding, but also might be very difficult because honestly, as y- you've seen, we had some, uh, we had some pretty interesting weather last year, and we've had a pretty interesting weather season so far this year too.

Yeah.

So what I'd like to impress upon folks, to kind of get back and answer your question, is we did have a, a fair amount of people who went to volunteerunited.org and signed up to take phone calls for us starting in the month of September for seniors that'll start registering in September, uh, so that's fantastic.

We do appreciate that.

We would certainly love to have more folks, so even if you're just now hearing this for the first time, uh, seniors call during the month of September to a special phone line that we have at the United Way office in St. Joseph, and, uh, we will provide all the necessary, you know, workspace for you, the, the computer, certainly the phone.

Yeah, yeah.

That creates a lot of issues for lots of homeowners, but especially for seniors who don't have those abilities to perhaps pay for all the things that need to be done to keep their foundations free of leaves, debris, grass, all sorts of other stuff.

That's where Rake a Difference comes in, and the volunteers that do this work love, love, love doing it.

So what I'd like to impress upon folks to kind of get back and answer your question is we did have a fair amount of people who went to volunteerunited.org and signed up to take phone calls for us starting in the month of September.

For seniors, it'll start registering in September.

So that's fantastic.

We do appreciate that.

I mean, I've seen a lot of different teams really take great pride in volunteering, getting together a team from their workplace to help out in this way.

Thank you for coming

in.

Absolutely.

It's good to see you.

You too.

What's happening? One of the programs that United Way hosts along with our friends at the Bering County Health Department, the Southwest Michigan Planning Commission and Corwell Health.

is Be Healthy Berrien you've heard our director Dawn Marie Smith she's coming in the past to talk about the work that Be Healthy Berrien does in the community the mission of Be Healthy Berrien as a program of United Way we're kind of the fiduciary the anchor for that program and again attached to all these stakeholders who who have you know a piece of the work that occurs in the area but a lot of it was originally created to focus on reducing obesity in Berrien County And just doing things generally to help the environment, you know, spaces and all sorts of other things just be generally more accessible and healthier for people to enjoy.

Who

That's very creative.

Team Lake Michigan College has not chosen a boat name yet, but they are participating.

I should mention, we have all three colleges here in Southwest Michigan participating.

We are going to work to put them in a heat together.

So SMC, LMC, and Andrews are all participating.

That's outstanding.

We also have, I think, three different robotics teams.

Everybody else

You see people gather

around.

There's a fence line all the way along the channel.

So there's plenty of places to watch.

We usually have about 1,000 spectators that show up.

It'll be easy to get to.

In years past, people have usually had to park on the grass.

yeah watch out for the robotics teams because they're smart and

Yes, I understand.

School, we just got out for summer.

But what this happens to be is it's registration to receive school supplies for free, plus a backpack, for Cass County students.

So if you, for example, reside in Eau Claire, but you go to schools in Cass County, you would qualify for something like this, certainly if you live in and attend school in Cass County.

What we're looking for are, year after year, we've certainly... supported the Cass County community with backpacks to assist those families who are in and below the Alice population that are truly in need.

And this little leg up for them can usually help quite a bit down the line for all the other expenses that are related to schools.

But certainly... uh, expenses related to working families, or if you think of senior citizens who might be supporting, uh, some of their own families due to different situations, uh, all of those folks on fixed income certainly would welcome the opportunity to get, you know, this free backpack, uh, with some school supplies, which we've done for many years as part of our work in Cass County.

Once again, the website for people interested in partaking.

And you

could also really think of two retirees and retirees.

seniors in our community who live on fixed incomes, where any sort of really the best way that we always describe it is it's the group of vulnerable people who kind of are, they're not in, you know, below the poverty line, but they are one crisis away from having that snowball effect that can happen in a family that brings sometimes, you know, families to the, the, the front door of being in the poverty line.

And, and so when we, When you look at all of the different ways in which communities serve the vulnerable groups and populations that exist, those who are in poverty often have an awful lot of support from lots of different programs, government or otherwise, to help make sure that they are rising from their situation.

The group that tended not to have a bit of assistance is that vulnerable population that's on the step of being close to poverty.

So many, many years ago, United Way all across the country with our United Way worldwide organization got together and said, you know, how do we really help define who these people are and make sure that we look at the data to help us understand what is it that's driving these factors that put somebody in an Alice population? OK, to to really get a sense for how we're because you can't solve anything if you don't know what's causing it.

You can't find out.

But for the average person, this is a way that community organizations keep tabs on who's in the community and what services might they need.

well in advance of that and to get trained?

We absolutely do.

There are people, there are a fair amount of retired folks who end up being the volunteers for this who have potentially been in the financial industry.

Maybe they were an accountant in the past, but even some people who have had nothing to do with financial anything, but they're just, they like math or they like numbers or they simply like helping people.

And really, again, the computers are doing a great deal of that part anyway because they're just filing it into our free tax system that we use.

It's very similar to some of the other tax programs that people have used on the Internet.

But they use this one specifically through the service that United Way helps to fund.

Wow.