The United Way of Loudon County annual campaign is beginning to draw to a close, and Tellico Village may come up short of its $90,000 goal.
As of late last week, Judy Fenton, local United Way executive director, said the amount raised was $82,000 in the Village. She said this marks the first time in at least seven years the Tellico Village branch of the United Way failed to meet its campaign goal.
Tellico Village still remains one of the top three contributors for United Way, which also includes Kimberly-Clark and Tate & Lyle, she said.
“I do not think the goal was too high,” Fenton said in an email correspondence. “You have to keep challenging yourself to let everyone know how important the agencies that we fund are to the community. We have a lot of new people in Tellico Village who may not be familiar with our work or that of our partners.”
Villagers surpassed the $88,000 goal last year by $240, United Way board chairman Andy Ewing said. Ewing’s tenure as board chairman will conclude at the end of March.
Ewing said while he was unable to pinpoint why fewer donations have come in this year, the economy or newcomers in the Village might have played a role.
“I don’t know whether it’s the economy or whether just the new people coming in are from a different age than most of us who came down here 10, 15, 20 years ago,” Ewing said. “But it’s a problem. I don’t know what more to tell you. We’re grateful for those who certainly continue to support us, but I don’t have any great ideas as to what we can do to generate more interest in the United Way.”
Villagers can still make a donation to United Way through March 31 when the overall county campaign ends and the fiscal year for the nonprofit organization comes to a close.
Ewing said advertising in the Village has stopped.
“It’s important that the Village contribution to the overall county — (the) campaign is very important,” Ewing said. “Again, I can’t account for it. We actually tried a few additional things this year in terms of trying to get people’s attention and enthusiasm up.”
One way United Way attempted to boost interest in the campaign was by holding its first street fair in September, which Villagers attended in what is now the Tellico Village Property Owners Association Welcome Center parking lot.
Fenton said United Way supports 33 partner agencies.
Such groups include the Tellico Village Volunteer Fire Department, STAYinTV, Tellico Village Computer Users Club and Loudon County Sheriff’s Office Project Lifesaver.
United Way of Loudon County’s overall campaign goal is $475,000. Currently, the nonprofit organization has raised $419,204.97, or 88.3 percent of the goal, Fenton said.
“It’s an educated guess that we’ll be approximately the same as we were last year, which is good,” Ewing said.
Still, Ewing said not reaching the set goal isn’t necessarily “positive.”
“I’m not sure I’d characterize it as positive because if you don’t make your goal, or if you don’t exceed growth from year to year, as the old saying, ‘If you don’t grow, you’re losing ground. You’re slipping behind’,” Ewing said.
STAYinTV treasurer and Rides Program coordinator Chris Garner said United Way helped the local group afford a computer system last year to assist with the recently started transportation program. The computer system helps determine how much it will cost for a volunteer driver to take a resident to a location in the area.
“What it does is it’s got the ability to — the rider lives at one location, the driver lives at another, and they want to go to a doctor’s appointment that’s a third location,” Garner said. “So it allows us to go into the computer program and say, ‘OK, we’ve got a driver who lives at point A and a rider who lives at point B and they need to get to point C.’ Well it figures out the mileage for these points from the driver’s house to the rider to the destination, back to the rider and back to the driver’s house. So we know how many miles to do.”
In exchange for transporting residents to where they need to go, riders are charged a small fee, Garner said. The computer program allows for Rides Program officials to keep track of how much is in a person’s account at any given time, he said. Garner said United Way gave $1,000 for the Rides Program in December 2014 for transportation in the following year, and the nonprofit organization gave another $1,000 this past “late fall” to help pay for the program through 2016. So far usage of the program has been slow, but Garner said he has seen an increase for 2016, noting that volunteers made 11 transports in January and five have already been made in February.
“We got the program for 2015 with the idea that we would help the county through ... Loudon County Senior Center ... develop a Rides program for them also,” he said. “And we anticipated ... we would be getting ... 15 or 20 rides a month at least doing this, and so we needed a program like this to keep track of things and do that.”
