Q&A with Amy Mangold, CEO of United Way of Southwestern Indiana
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Amy Mangold became CEO and president of United Way of Southwestern Indiana following the April retirement of Amy Canterbury, who won the Republican primary for Vanderburgh District 3 County Commissioner earlier this month.
Mangold has been the marketing and communications director for United Way since 2020. She spoke with Inside INdiana Business about her goals as CEO and president and United Way’s transition to an issue-focused organization.
Tell me about the history of United Way of Southwestern Indiana.
We started back in 1922 as the Community Chest, and we were originally brought together to be a united fundraising campaign to support human service organizations in our community. And that has really been the mission for a century, although the terminology has changed and our model has changed—we not only do fundraising—but that was the original intent.
United Way globally started in Denver in 1877 to help unite resources to support human service programs to meet community needs.
What challenges has United Way faced?
As the world has evolved and changed and nonprofits have become more sophisticated in their fundraising, we have found that the old model of investing in a closed group of partner agencies was outdated. We were giving a little bit of money to a lot of organizations, and our donors were coming back to us saying, “We give this money to you every year, and you do some reporting, but what’s changing? Where is the impact?”
So back in 2017-2018, the board embarked on a strategic plan. That’s when they said we need to focus on a community issue and reevaluate this funding model because we could potentially lose donors and investors if we don’t show larger impact against community issues.
We made the change to become an issue-focused United Way. Our community conversations told us individuals living in poverty and those working families who are still struggling to make ends meet are our biggest community issues.
In transitioning to a focused model on poverty reduction and upward mobility, we had to change our funding model for our legacy partner agencies. That was a little painful, even though it was a three-year process, and we offered transition funding for up to 36 months.
Change is difficult, and that was a challenging time for some of our legacy partners. It was also a challenging time for donors and investors who have an affinity for a specific organization because their organization might not align with our goal of poverty reduction and upward mobility.
Philanthropy is also changing quite a bit. United Way has always been known as the model of going into a workplace campaign, and everybody was expected to give. Attitudes around that are changing, and organizations and corporations are changing how they encourage their employees to support their community. As that industry changes, we have to evolve along with it so we can continue to secure the resources we need to solve our community’s problems.
What have been United Way’s successes?
We have come out on the other side of our transition stronger and had real excitement and great feedback about our focus on poverty reduction and upward mobility. We’ve developed four Pathways to Potential that are key elements in helping communities and individuals become more upwardly mobile.
There’s empowering employment, which is being able to obtain and maintain a living wage job. That might be barrier-busting transportation and child care issues. What keeps people from maintaining these living wage jobs?
Mental health is a huge issue in our community and nationwide and a large focus. If you don’t have good mental health, then other things don’t fall in place. There is a strong correlation between poverty, economic mobility and mental health. Then, of course, our youth, looking at a two-gen approach to reducing poverty for our youth so we can break the cycle of generational poverty.
Another piece is social capital, which is often a hidden thing in terms of upwardly mobile communities. Do you have the networks that are the safety net for you if your car breaks down? Will your neighbor or family take you to work so you don’t lose your job, and do you have the networks that help you grow and expand? Someone who might write that letter of recommendation for you to get into the community college, or someone who might introduce you to someone for that interview that you didn’t think you could ever land.
Moving to these pathways, we are seeing great momentum. We’re also focusing our investments and making much larger investments into the nonprofits that are working in these spaces to make a larger impact.
We run a kindergarten readiness camp, and we’ve been able, with a partnership with the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corp., to expand that from four sites to nine. This year, we’ve been invited to become part of the Evansville Promise Neighborhood project, which we’re super excited about. We were fortunate to be invited to the table of our Talent EVV regional initiative and lead the upward mobility focus area.
We were able to successfully assume the Vanderburgh County affiliate of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and now we’ve launched that in Spencer County, where it wasn’t available in the past. Since we know true deep change is going to be made in the larger systems rather than just interventional change, we’re starting to dip our toe into the advocacy space to help determine improvements and things that can happen within the public policy arena.
Tell me about your history with United Way.
I came right in the midst of COVID in July 2020, right before United Way was getting ready to launch the fall campaign. It was hit the ground sprinting and build the plane while you’re flying it because everything we have ever done now needs to go digital. It was quite an interesting and exciting time because it was all so new, and we were figuring out how to make it work while it was happening.
We launched the campaign that fall, and then it was all hands on deck in terms of helping communicate, work with the board and translate this whole change to an issue-funding model as well as helping people understand that. Making sure we were getting in front of donors, investors, partners and volunteers with information on what we were doing, why we were doing it, how we were doing it and what the result was going to be.
What did you learn from your predecessor, Amy Canterbury?
I value connections, but, and she will say this of herself, she is truly a connector. Definitely the value of connections and having a seat at the table, Amy is and always has been great about asking for a seat at the table, that we belong there. That we do have an understanding and a vast array of resources that we can pull together to help with community issues.
Then also being willing to fail and fail fast and not to be afraid of failure. That it’s a great learning opportunity—learn from it quickly and then move on.
What are your short-term goals as president and CEO?
I want to listen and learn from our team, board, donors and partners. I have been in a different role, and I want to sit in this learning space because vision and goals can’t be developed just by me in isolation and then prescribed to someone else.
The expertise, strength and insights on how we can improve and what the team is learning at the tables that they sit at, the information that they’re bringing back, how that can inform a larger plan, vision and goals that everyone can buy into because they’ve been part of it. That expertise lies with the wonderful group of people that we have on the team and board.
What are your long-term goals?
Once I coalesce all of this information, and we look at our strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, I can say one opportunity I’m focused on is identifying ways to diversify our revenue sources.
We need to be able to sustain ourselves for the next 100 years, regardless of economic fluctuations, if workplace campaigns start to diminish. How do we strategically look at ways to sustain ourselves well into the future with different types of revenue sources? Be it grants, service fee models, things like that to help us continue forward.
Looking at our next strategic plan will be a goal of mine. And that will come from some of that learning as I continue to work with donors, the board and the team. How we want to look to the future and what we want to plan for the next year, three years, five years down the road.
I want United Way to be viewed as a key community leader that understands our issues. That we sit in the space of forging those partnerships and collaborations, and we invest in proven and effective initiatives that move the needle on solving those problems. How can we help identify synergies within organizations so that we can work together on the same path working toward the same goal? We’ll get much more strength from that and directional momentum.
I also want United Way to be seen as actively identifying and working to breach the barriers to upward mobility that are prevalent among marginalized populations, whether it be Black, Latino, Marshallese. We are working in that space now, and there’s a lot of work to be done, but I’d love to see us continue to grow in that and strengthen that as well.
What’s new with United Way in 2024?
We’re in the initial phases of beginning initiation, discovery and implementation of a new community impact product. I’m not at liberty to say what that is yet, but I can say that it will be targeted toward helping those who are struggling, working families or those in the [Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed] population.
It’s the 30th anniversary of our Day of Caring this fall. We are excited to bring our amazing community volunteers together and all the wonderful nonprofits who are boots on the ground, changing people’s lives every day, matching, doing the beautiful thing of matchmaking, and having a great day with the Day of Caring.
We’re exploring other community impact products that might not launch in 2024, but people will want to keep an eye on United Way as we continue to try and grow our impact in the community.
How can people get involved with United Way?
We’re always looking for people to sign up for Day of Caring and to be involved with that event. We can use volunteers for our own events, so we would love it if they would give us a buzz at 812-422-4100 or visit our website and fill out an inquiry form to volunteer for one of our United Way events.
Sometimes we are looking for expert task force members. In each of our pathways, we assemble a group of experts in that field that help us write our purpose statement. They help us create the application and the scoring rubric, and then they help us blindly review applications.
If people have specific expertise in those areas, whether it be employment, social capital, mental health, or youth-serving organizations, we are usually on our grant cycles looking for expert task force members so that we can tap into their knowledge to help us invest the most wisely in the most effective programs each time.