United Way of Defiance County

United Way of Defiance County's community impact areas are: education, income, health, and essential services. Our community campaign takes place predominately in the fall each year where we solicit the community to support programs that collaborate to address our impact areas. A group of dedicated community volunteers make up our community investment team who review, interview, and recommend funding to our board. The donated funds support 29 local programs benefiting Defiance County.

The United Way of Defiance County coordinated the 7th annual kindergarten camp at all 5 elementary schools. This program is a weeklong introduction to kindergarten for students who were screened as being "at-risk." 109 students attended the weeklong program.the monarch fund was established from monies designated to us by the promedica foundation. These funds are to be used for health related needs. Once we have a spcific need we contact pormedica and request use of the designated funds.

The back pack buddy program is a weekend food program for children enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program at six elementary schools in Defiance County and younger siblings at home not attending school. Each weekend during the academic year a back pack with kid friendly, nutritious food is sent home with the enrolled children. On average almost 400 back packs are stuffed weekly providing food for the children.

All other accomplishments other program service accomplishments include: the community engagement center, cec, a volunteer portal on the United Way of Defiance County website that connects volunteers with volunteer opportunities in our community. The cec has 878 registered volunteers and 61 registered agencies with over 721 hours of community service coordinated or referred. The volunteer value of those volunteer hours is 20,577. Hosted the 9th annual dr. seuss birthday celebration connecting 55 volunteers to local elementary school classrooms to read books aloud. In partnership with the United states postal service letter carriers, 18,000 pounds of food was collected for 7 food pantries in Defiance County in a single day. Continued supporting the feeding success program which supplied a personal care and food pantry for each middle and high school in Defiance County. The United Way of Defiance County is a fiscal sponsor for the women's giving circle of Defiance County. The mission of the women's giving circle is to support projects that impact the lives of women and children. The imagination library distributed 11,568 new books to 1,024 children aged birth to 5 through the dolly parton imagination library program, with more than 1,589 children graduating since 2009.