'We know it works': Bill Jackson reflects on a change that reinvented Erie's United Way

Bill Jackson said the United Way of Erie County that he joined 25 years ago collected a lot of money and worked hard to do good things with it.

But sometimes, Jackson said, it was hard to find evidence that the organization was making a measurable difference.

"What happened is our board started to recognize that it's good, but it's not really solving anything," Jackson said. "It's a Band-Aid approach. We are helping this person over here, this person over there, and this family on the other side of town. But we are not really getting at what is causing these problems in the first place."

Jackson, who retires from the United Way on Dec. 31, said it wasn't that the traditional way of running the organization was a failure.

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"We could talk all day about the good work that was done and the people we helped," he said. "The model worked when we could go into large companies and make a very simple ask and folks would donate a little bit out of their paychecks."

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But the world was changing.

For one, there weren't as many big companies to visit.

Meanwhile, Jackson, the board and the staff of the United Way were listening to ideas about a different way to run the organization coming from places such as the United Way in Fort Worth, Texas.

The message was simple but important.

"We should stop counting our success by how many people we help and start counting our success by how many people no longer need our help," Jackson said. "That really sums up what the philosophy is. That was a huge sea change."

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Changes didn't happen overnight.

In 2015, the United Way's board of directors voted to change its approach. Three years later, Jackson stood before a community group and announced the agency's single-minded devotion to "crush poverty."

The plan that would emerge was a focus on community schools, 11 of which have now been designated. Together, those schools serve more than 6,000 students.

In words from the United Way website, those designated schools, each of which employs a director, "bring a wide range of resources directly into the school to support students and their families, removing barriers to learning so children can be successful in school ... and life."

Jackson likens the United Way's role in community schools to that of a symphony conductor who doesn't play an instrument but coordinates services.

"We talk about how the mission is to crush poverty," Jackson said. "Everything we do has to do with student success or family stability."

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A concept in action

Jackson likes to tell the story of bringing a mobile dental clinic to a community school to help "a student who had so much pain from her cavities that she was in tears."

The pain was an obstacle to learning, he said.

Sometimes, the services to students are less dramatic — providing a meal, or a warm coat and boots, or helping a family connect with needed services.

"It's just being able to address the issues," Jackson said. "Attendance is a big issue that we have been able to focus on using a grant from the Erie Community Foundation."

Working with Gannon University, the city of Erie and the Blue Coats, the community schools program was able to identify safer routes for students walking to school and created something called a walking school bus that provides an adult who leads a group of children to school.

While more than half of the United Way's resources are focused on community schools, it offers a number of other programs, including Erie Free Taxes; the 211 Help Line, which provides resources for health and human services information for everyday needs and also crisis situations; and the Imagination Library, which provides age-appropriate free books for nearly 10,000 Erie County children each month.

Back in August 2018, Jackson talked about how the pieces fit together.

"For the first time in our over 100-year history, everything we fund fits strategically within a portfolio of investments that complement each other and work toward the common goals of student success and family stability," Jackson said at the time.

In a recent interview, Jackson said he believes in the course the United Way has charted.

"There is so much evidence, and we know it works," Jackson said. "If we do it with fidelity, it has to work."

A difficult change

But moving from the old model of funding a longer list of efforts to this new model wasn't easy, Jackson said.

It would have been easier to maintain the status quo, said Charles "Boo" Hagerty, who is president of the Hamot Health Foundation and a member of the United Way's board of directors.

And It would have been tempting at one point to go backward or not change the funding model in the first place, he said.

"I think everyone would have listened to him," Hagerty said. "Bill is a man of character. He has a moral compass that points north."

Hagerty said reinventing the United Way's mission was a group effort, "but he (Jackson) was certainly the champion of it."

That meant difficult conversations with nonprofit leaders who had grown accustomed to receiving yearly grants.

"I was in a lot of meetings where Bill took a lot of bullets and did it empathetically," Hagerty said. "I have seen other people in the past take the easy road. Bill never took the easy road. He was bold enough to say 'I am going to stick with my mission.'"

At 62, Jackson said he's ready to step down from the job he's held since 2009. He said he's especially pleased that Laurie Root, who served most recently as senior vice president for seven years, will take his place.

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"I think it's fresh energy, and she was one of the architects of the most recent ideation of where we are today," Jackson said. "She has it in her heart in terms of what we are doing here. If someone else came in from the outside, I wouldn't be as comfortable with leaving the organization."

Jackson has said it's time for new leadership at the United Way. But that doesn't mean he's ready for retirement.

"I'm going to retire from here, but I am going to do something, I don't know what yet," Jackson said. "I want to get involved with another organization that is looking to transform. Full-time sounds really good if it has the right interest and excitement."

Jackson is ending a 25-year career with the United Way but remains convinced that changing the organization he loved was the right thing to do.

That's what his gut tells him.

And that's what the numbers show.

"Under the old model, we were asking people to trust us to do good things with the money they gave us," he said. "Today, we can show you here is a book in the hand of a child, and we can talk about what's going on in the schools.

"We can show them the evidence."

Contact Jim Martin at 814-870-1668 or jmartin@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @ETNMartin.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Bill Jackson, longtime leader of United Way of Erie County, looks back