Workforce 180 with United Way's Kathleen Lorenz
On Episode #35 of Building BN, BNEDC CEO Patrick Hoban sits down to talk with Kathleen Lorenz of United Way of McLean County. Lorenz, alumni of ISU and long-time resident of Bloomington-Normal, is currently working as Community Investment Director for United Way of McLean County and, additionally, is an elected member of the Normal Town Council — her current term ends in 2023.
Lorenz, who has worked in various capacities with the United Way of McLean County since 2017, started working full-time in November 2020. This new position coincided with major changes at UW McLean, mostly related to trends affecting their fundraising model of traditional workplace campaigns — which the United Way has relied upon for decades — and an emerging trend of companies abandoning this type of employee giving.
“State Farm,” said Lorenz, “chose to step back from the traditional workplace campaign and go more to an employee choice and more online. That significantly changed our ability to raise funds. Forty five percent of United Way's workplace campaign funds came from State Farm… We really were not able to meet the needs of as many agencies and those which we could still give to — it just didn't seem like enough. So, we had to reimagine how to do the proverbial more with less and reestablish ourselves with the donors in the community, but in a new way. And so that became our own 180 that we had to do.”
This 180-shift in strategies, says Lorenz, includes a new community initiative — Workforce 180. From their website, Workforce180 “focuses on creating systems locally to link resources more effectively in helping at-risk youth enter more productive careers.”
This change — and the development of Workforce180 — wasn’t just about the changes in fundraising trends, explains Lorenz. It also addresses troubling data regarding poverty in McLean County. “When we made this 180-degree change internally about our value proposition, we wanted to address some alarming data that we were seeing coming out of some United Way data that's gathered for the whole state. And that data was showing that here in McLean County, the number of households in poverty and at near poverty was increasing. In fact, some segments of it are increasing by 70 percent or so from twenty ten to twenty seventeen ...Workforce 180 is not a program. It's an investment.”
Workforce180 has three phases that candidates complete, once accepted into the program. From the website, “The three phases of Workforce180 help each person develop skills and experience to enter the workforce and become self-sufficient and thriving individuals.”
For more information regarding WorkForce180 or United Way of McLean County, please visit their website: https://uwmclean.org/. You can contact Lorenz by email for more information about the Workforce180 program. She especially wants to hear from you if you are a social-service agency with clients who may benefit from this program: klorenz@uwaymc.org. You can listen to the conversation in its entirety here, which includes Lorenz’s list of the top ten things to see and do in Bloomington-Normal, her philosophy on why economic development is important, and what ALICE stands for.
