United Way Innovation: Driving the Dream-United Way of the Mid-South
How do we unite to make fighting poverty a priority for a community? In Memphis, poverty is widespread within the community. The statistics are clear — the poverty rate ranks alarmingly high at 26.25% — 11.5% higher than the national average. This rate has remained consistently high due to multi-generational poverty. Multi-generational poverty is when a family has lived in poverty for at least two generations.
We often believe poor people bring poverty upon themselves through bad life choices. However, we fail to recognize that in most cases, the poor inherit poverty from preexisting conditions. Poverty isn’t merely the result of individual behavior and circumstances. It is the product of community conditions, exploitation, politics, redlining, predatory lending… The list is endless.
With these challenges in mind, United Way of Mid-South developed the Driving the Dream initiative to guide families from poverty towards a future of their own choosing. United Way of the Mid-South’s underlying notion for this initiative is to treat poverty as a health condition instead of a moral failure.
In medicine and public health, we are trained to identify and address factors that influence a patient’s health-education, socioeconomic status, environment. These are called social determinants. In order to address poverty, we must look at these same factors that contribute to financial success.
Driving the Dream is closely aligned with the 2-Gen whole family service delivery model which was implemented in the Tennessee Department of Human Services. The 2-Gen Approach recognizes the separate needs of parents and children to help low-income families disrupt multi-generational poverty. 2-Gen has proven effective at breaking families free from the trap of poverty and empowering them to live up to their potential. By implementing the 2-Gen framework within Driving the Dream, the programs are aligned and in sync.
In the non-profit sector, we often lack a collective, consistent and constructive strategy for addressing poverty and human need in our city. To prevent a climate of silos and duplication of services, Driving the Dream is collaborating across programs, services, and partner agencies to collectively refer individuals to appropriate services. All progress is tracked in a shared database. Driving the Dream uses this data to provide real-time continuous quality improvement data to partner agencies as they work with families.
Driving the Dream Program Components include:
- Transition to Success Care Model: Helps clients develop a map of their goals and dreams to make the connections to needed services
- Arizona Self-Sufficiency Inventory: Assess client needs using 20 key quality of life indicators
- CoactionNet: A shared web-based database which centralizes information and tracks client’s progress
Lead by Cecilia Johnson-Powell, Driving the Dream envisions a world where everyone has equal access to resources needed to achieve their hopes and dreams. Poverty robs children of their future, adults of their dreams, and cities of their growth.
Instead of making temporary fixes, Driving the Dream is a long-term solution to treating poverty. Since its launch in February, Driving the Dream has secured independent public and private funding and partnered with 45 agencies who collectively served 16,000 individuals in the previous month.
