Impact Areas

United Way advances the common good by creating opportunities for a better life for all.

Our focus is on ensuring all San Diegans have Education, Income and Health: the building blocks for a good life.

EDUCATION – Helping children achieve their potential through education initiatives.

INCOME – Teaching financial self-sufficiency and job skills to struggling families and youth.

HEALTH – Improving community health by providing the homeless with permanent housing and support services. Protecting children from abuse and neglect, providing specialized trauma counseling, and training health practitioners

Why these three areas? Because we believe everyone deserves opportunities to have a good life: a quality education that leads to a stable job, enough income to support a family through retirement, and good health. We are all connected and interdependent; We all win when a child succeeds in school, when families are financially stable, when people are healthy.

Our goal is to create long-lasting changes to our region's most pressing problems by addressing their underlying causes.

How are we doing this? By implementing a new business model known as Community Impact, which concentrates on solving specific community issues and distributing resources where they are most effective. We research and solve specific community issues by deploying strategies that have been proven to work.

The Strategy: We recruit the people and organizations from all across the community who bring the passion, expertise and resources needed to get things done.

The Success: We have already seen systemic change in how some of our most troubling community issues are being solved. Read more about the solutions to financial instability, homelessness and child abuse and neglect in our Community Impact Progress Reports. Together, we are improving not just the lives of individuals and families, but the community as a whole.

• Did you know that that 1 in 3 San Diego households don't earn enough to make ends meet? Read more in the Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) report. Then visit our Income section to find out the many ways we're helping move San Diegans from struggle to stability.
   
• Some residents of San Diego are thriving, while others are merely surviving. Read more about the disparity among local residents in the areas of Education, Income and Health in A Portrait of California, prepared by the American Human Development Project.